Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Advanced 3D system architecture

This is a thing I normally don't do: Embedding someone else's stuff on my blog. However, this is an exception.



The video below shows how IBM uses Second Life in order to create 3D system models. This one was posted at the 8bar blog.




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It's Infocalypse for Second Life

Infocalypse at the economic heart of Second Life?

It's a warzone! The Linden Index has crashed, it's economy is imploding and one after the other financial scandal is hitting the blogoshpere. Someone just shouted "The end is near!" over at twitter. Well, there is some truth in this part of the blog.

Due to Linden Labs taking actions against gambling in SL - incorporating RL law there has been a drop in money exchange. This will be a temporary setback as it will make way for new and healthy business. What is serious is that there has been theft at the WSE, the World Stock Exchange, an inside-job so it seems. Extensive coverage can be found at the Virtually Blind blog.

Infocalypse at the social heart of Second Life?

Then there is rumours of Terrorism in Second Life, coming from a paper Down Under. Fortunately this piece of bad-research has quickly been dysected by Mitch Wagner at Informationweek:

"The article cites well-known reports of "griefing" in Second Life -- malicious practical joking -- and employs a lot of breathless prose and distortion to make it seem like the global terror network is on the brink of using Second Life to launch a real-world terror campaign against all decent people everywhere."

There's no such thing as Second Life taking casualties. We're not talking about real life bombings. What we are talking about is griefing, which is WEB -10.0 [in other words neanderthal behaviour which is sooo 2007 (BC)]

What will be the fall-out of these stories? In my personal opinion it is way overdone. These blogposts over at Second Thoughts and Metaversed are providing the Griefers a sublime stage. They're feeding it! It seems Prokofy's fabled paranoia and FICification have entered the next stage of the conspiracy-theory-virus.

In my humble opinion, this is all strongly overhyped. This is confirmed by reliable sources who say that Linden "can shoot themselves in the foot just fine."

Infocalypse at the creative heart of Second Life!

Before we all go dramatic on Second Life, here's the twist: The only place where real infocalypse is going down is on the islands of Infocalypse, Saijo City and Nexus Prime, home to the cyberpunk community and spindoctor Eric Rice.


There's the Infocalypse project which is offering a podium and decorum for writing vivid new cyberpunk stories. Second Life proofs to be an excellent stage once more for collaboration and making stories come to life!
Here's an extract from the original blogpost mixed with some screenshots of these sims:
Say you wanted to create derivative work, say, a novel or video game or drawing, and place it in those locations, technically you can’t. You *can* if you consider fan fiction (’fanfic’ for short), but don’t ever expect to do anything with it beyond your own personal amusement. Build as little as a fan site, one that celebrates a franchise, and you could be beamed up to the USS Litigation. This has a long history and is certainly not new (flashback: Wired, Dec. 1996).

Enter Saijo City. Saijo exists as a newborn franchise that could be any one of those works of fiction. There are characters and there is the place of the city itself. Saijo’s genre is cyberpunk, set in a near future of maybe 60-100 years out.

What makes Saijo City different and not spectacularly ‘new’, is that it exists as many pieces, both traditional and contemporary, that are simply rearranged. It would be easy to say, “Yes, I’m writing a science fiction book, due out this summer,” and the conversation would be over.
But that’s not how life in my city goes.
Saijo City as a piece of transliterate content, operates on some very simple and familiar principles. (read more at I, Platform)

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Monday, July 30, 2007

Capozzi branding hyperjump

Everything new gets dubbed 2.0 these days, upto and including the Financial Times writing on gospel 2.0 or the blogoshpere getting excited about Philantropy 2.0 or Fundraising 2.0. To state that this blogpost is about wine 2.0 or distilling 2.0 would not give credit enough to the sim I visited today...



This is a tale beyond a succesful immersion - even when the island hasn't seen it's final version and opening yet. This is a tale of creating a brand 21st century style in a 19th century business.



The business I'm referring to is that of making wine, a traditional profession that -at least in Europe- brings images of old, weathered farmers and old French chateau's. It's classic and romantic and absolutely non-tech-savvy. During the 20th century we have seen the rise of new wineproduction areas, like California, South Africa and New Zealand gaining popularity over the traditional French and Spanish wines. The popularity of these new wines are partly because these wineries use modern technology to create well balanced wines and of a more constant quality than the traditional French ones.



Here's a look at the Capozzi sim





To start off by calling this a hyperjump and getting all excited about it does raise some expectations. Why?



If you look at the sim -without its context- it's nothing special. It is a quality build, as expected when built by Chip Poutine of the Prion Design Group and the guys (and girls) over at Metaversatility. Lush green rolling hills house the winery and a path that leads through the various stages of the production process. Though totally different in design than the Ben & Jerry's factory in Second Life, it's the same concept. So why the buzz?






The buzz is that this is not a brand creating a virtual presence like "we've got to be there" but it is a grand design in creating the brand itself. The Capozzi winery was established in 2005 by Josh Hermsmeyer and really is a tale of crowdsourcing as it started off on the pinotblogger blog:



"On November 18, ‘05 pinotblogger was born. Its stated purpose is to “outline the long and painful processes involved in starting and building a family winery in the Russian River Valley. While we haven’t been at it very long nor has it been particularly painful yet, I’m 99.9% certain that at least one of these adjectives will correctly describe the project in the very near future (hopefully NOT painful and short though, as that would be sad)."



Meanwhile the Pinotblogger website has been been among the top 5 wineblogs in the world and gives a great insight in the business and starting up the new winery. The virtual presence complements this strategy. It's an all in, a 21st century marketing campaign from a traditional craft, that's a hyperjump.




Read more on the build of the sim at the http://www.simvineyard.com/ website, or visit it inworld: SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Capozzi%20Winery/121/235/37

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Telecom Italia brings San Siro

I just picked up a notice on the Dutch Second Life site on Telecom Italia Mobile. Telecom Italia subsidiary, Alice, comes to Second Life with a 4 sim strong build making it about the 12th telecom and broadband provider to immerse.



The venue is brought to Second Life by ISN (Image Solutions Network) which have their office next to the TIM-sims. As we speak there's a lot of activity going on over there, so probably a launch party. Due to my limited knowledge of Italian i thought it best to steer clear of that gig.





The TIM-sims are build around a central venue, the Alice office which is crown-shaped and lies at the intersection of the four sims. Throughout the sims several other office buildings appear.



Telecom Italia is showing that there are several ways of translating its business to the Metaspace. Throughout the sims you will find futuristic phonebooths to communicatie with Real Life and from their Alice broadband division they are bringing Italy's most popular sports; Soccer and Formula 1 racing.



According to the SLNN Alice plans on not only streaming soccermatches from the San Siro stadium (AC Milan and Inter Milan) but also play virtual matches, with a special Heads Up Display (HUD) being developed:



"While some soccer stadiums, most notably KPN's Ajax Arena, and Inter of Milano have featured broadcasts of soccer games, Telecom Italia's sim promises the first full game soccer animation, using a script and a heads up display (HUD) so that users can actually play.

We will organize real tournaments, both for soccer and for car and moto racing,” Mattia Crespi, ISN's CEO said. Alice offers online service selling videos on demand. Videos will be available at the Alice island for free, along with many videos taken from Dailymotion, an Alice video-sharing service similar to Youtube, Crespi says."



For this video on demand venue Alice worked out a fly-in movietheatre (pic right)




SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Telecom%20Italia%202/101/120/22

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Saturday, July 28, 2007

Nintendo - Xbox and Playstation sighted in SL

First of all a few random islands I've spotted today. One is a new telecom company in SL, Swisscom (Telecom provider from Switzerland) (SLURL). Aside from this sure thing there are two islands look to be holding new business as well, Generali (Banking)(SLURL) and Carpe Diem (Beds of Sweden) (SLURL) may also hold new businesses.



Secondly I ran into a cluster of islands that bring a promise of fierce competition, these islands are called:

  1. Nintendo
  2. Nintendo Wii
  3. Microsoft Xbox
  4. Sony
  5. Sony Playstation
  6. Sega

Finally, Sony has been present with its music division, Sony BMG at the Millions of Us cluster island 'Media' but looks like they're gearing up as well in the Japanese quarters with a sim called Sony Home Pictures (SLURL).

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Second Life Yummy Garden

Just once in a while you meet that occasional mouthwatering venue in Second Life. In response to my Brand Directory listing Gwen Kronsage tipped this venue in Second Life. While walking around in this virtual garden of delights I noticed quite a steady stream of visitors from every corner of the world.



This yummy garden is brought to us by Ben & Jerry's, the masters of icecream. Although BJ's must have got almost the same all-american image as the big M it's actually owned by Unilever, a Dutch multinational with over 400 well known brands.



The main venue holds a very colorfull factory, Ben & Jerry's First Environmental Factory with several dairy pastures and games. Upon entering the factory you'll get a floor plan and an overview of B&J's history.



The factory is a fun experience as you walk through the complete production process:

  1. Mix Making
  2. Flavouring
  3. Greenhouse
  4. Packaging
  5. Freezing



As an extra service there's the Ben & Jerrys orientation island, which is also in this übersweet candy-color style. A nice detail would have been to create a cream-topped hairdo, but maybe that would be too much for Second Life rookies.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ben%20and%20Jerrys/128/128/0

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Get yer free stack of virtual land

I just received word via twitter that Millions of Us is giving away free land to residents with creative ideas, a grand total of 8 complete sims:

"Social media is all about participation, right? In that spirit, Millions of Us will be opening up land on several of its sims in order to host the coolest projects you can come up with. We own 8 perimeter sims, clustered around the central eponymous sim — and that’s where we invite interested and motivated residents to help us fill those sims with fantastic Second Life content."

Read all at the Millions of Us blog.

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VeeJay's Branddirectory

Here's a list of Real Life brands in Second Life. I think the list is nearing completion, but I surely have forgotten a few. Which ones?



For a better view have a look at the page I'm setting up here. In that overview I've added flags to show where these companies are based, or which local office took the initiative (e.g. Fiat is Italian, but brought to Second Life from Brasil and Renault from France, but brought to Second Life by the Italians).



Advertising



  1. AKQA

  2. Abramelin Studios

  3. Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty

  4. Crayon

  5. Dieste Marketing

  6. Heartbeat Digital

  7. Leo Burnett

  8. Mediacom

  9. Square One Research

  10. Text 100


Automotive



  1. BMW

  2. Fiat

  3. Mazda

  4. Mercedes

  5. Motorati / Pontiac

  6. Nissan

  7. Renault

  8. Toyota


Employment Services



  1. Content

  2. Kelly

  3. Manpower

  4. Randstad


Finance



  1. ABN Amro

  2. BCV

  3. BNP Paribas

  4. Cofidis

  5. Credit Agricole

  6. Deutsche AG

  7. DNB Norway

  8. ING

  9. Saxo

  10. Suruga

  11. Visa

  12. Wirecard


Food & Beverage



  1. Capozzi Winery

  2. Coca Cola

  3. Guinness

  4. Heineken

  5. Suntory


Insurance



  1. Aegon

  2. Unive


Information Technology



  1. Amazon Web Services

  2. AMD

  3. Autodesk

  4. Cisco

  5. Dell

  6. Depo Consulting

  7. IBM

  8. Intel

  9. Lenovo

  10. Level 3

  11. Microsoft

  12. PA Consulting

  13. Softlab

  14. Sogeti

  15. Sprint

  16. Sun


Media & Entertainment



  1. ABC

  2. Avro

  3. BBC Radio 1

  4. BNN

  5. Channel 4

  6. CNET

  7. Fox Atomic

  8. Movietickets

  9. MTV

  10. NBC

  11. Penguin Books

  12. Regina Spektor

  13. Reuters

  14. Skynews

  15. Sony BMG

  16. Sundance Channel

  17. Talpa

  18. Q-Music

  19. Warner Bros

  20. Wired


Retail



  1. Adidas

  2. American Apparel

  3. Calvin Klein

  4. Nike

  5. Philips

  6. Reebok

  7. Sears

  8. Tendence


Telecom



  1. Argali

  2. Belgacom

  3. Comcast

  4. KPN

  5. Pulver

  6. Sony Ericson

  7. Telus

  8. Trimedia

  9. Vodafone

  10. You Never Call


Tourism



  1. Aloft Hotels

  2. Cumbrian Tourist Board

  3. Mexico Tourist Board

  4. STA Travel

  5. Starwood Hotels


Transport & Logistics



  1. Arriva

  2. Connexion

  3. DHL

  4. Dutch Railways (NS)

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Friday, July 27, 2007

Conquest of Paradise

Catholic missionaries have traveled to the ends of the earth to spread the Gospel. Now they're encouraged to enter the virtual world of Second Life and find the needy and the poor.

A Jesuit paper, La Civilta Cattolica in Rome, runs a story by Antonio Spadaro who challenges his colleagues not to fear Second Life, but instead enter it. According to Sparado is Second Life a fertile soil to find people about to change their lifes.

UPDATE

Just second after I published this post I Annie Ok, founder and director of the Second Life Art Center pointed me towards an article in the Financial Times, called Gospel 2.0: Jesuits move into Second Life.


This blog was based upon the short note in Metro, one of the Dutch free newspapers.

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Virtual Banking (13): BCV

Sharp readers will have noticed I skipped no. 12 in the series of Virtual banking. No. 11 in the series was Crédit Agricole and no. 12 is Cofidis, as French banker and insurance company. That blog was titled "Have a little Cofidis" due to the Tour de France debacle.



Bank number 13 is a Swiss bank, called the BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise). Here's their profile from their website:



"BCV was founded over 160 years ago to serve the people of Vaud, and we have kept our strong community focus to this day. We offer a full range of services, including retail banking, corporate banking, private banking and asset management.In addition we engage in BCV has trading activities in various financial markets. "



The island is quite craftly landscaped, stepping away from the 'normal photorealistic' trees and stuff, but doesn't hold much more than BVC's virtual Headquarters, but for a venue dating back to 7 februari 2007 it's part of the early bankers in Second Life.





In a second stage - a second Island - they've must have started looking for deeper involvement with the Second Life community and opened up BCV island 2. On this sim you'll find different venues, maybe from partners, or maybe collaborative builds but of lesser quality and inspiration than the main venue.


In a past life I used to do some webdesign and one of the deadliest sins in the business was - and still is - putting a visitor counter on a professional website. On BCV island 2 there is one ! It's on a building which counted me as visitor no. 63 since june 17.



(Okay, it's nice if you're called Esmee Denters and get 0ver 40 million views on youTube, but it's a bummer when you're a big corporate name and get only a few visitors).



SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/BCV%20Island/156/121/60

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5K Contest at StageSpace

There's big news at Stagespace was the introduction of an email I received from the German 3D platform Stagespace. In fall 2007 it will release its 1.0 version which will be a lot different from the current Beta version.

Stagespace will be a room for you, your creativity and your style, your stage on Internet and is organising a Design Contest with a 5K (hard euro's) reward. The contest is themed Pink is Green

Categories:
  1. Architecture (interior of the locations)
  2. Furniture and Object Design
  3. Texture Design for clothing

The winner will take 5.000 euro in prize money, which is a nice challenge. To make sure of the quality, Stagespace has put together quite an impressive jury team to judge the entries, among which the well known industrial designer Prof. Luigi Colani.


The closing date for submitting entries is August 30 (2007)

More info on the website http://www.pinkistgruen.de/

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

We believe in Children. Do you?

Through my good friend Aleister Kronos I was tipped that BBH (Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty ) and RRR (rivers run red) are bringing another Charity 2.0 event to Second Life.



Peter Rogers from the Ad Agency BBH let us know that each year BBH is sponsoring a good cause, and this year it's Barnardo's, which is a charity organisation that stands up for children in need.


"Bernardo's vision is that the lives of all children and young people should be free from poverty, abuse and discrimination. We believe in the abused, the vulnerable, the forgotten and the neglected. We will support them, stand up for them and bring out the best in each and every child. As one of the UK’s leading children’s charities this is our pledge. We believe in children – do you?"


By just becoming a dad again in Real Life, it's hard to turn away from organisations like these. A child's life is too valuable and some have to face such ordeals. so I quickly went over to the BBH island [slurl]


Here's some images of the venue:





"On the 1st of August 2007 the advertising company BBH will have a special day for one of it's clients. It's called the Barnardos day out or BDO for short. The goal is to raise as much money for Barnardos as possible. We needed a plan so got together with Rivers Run Red a company that helps us turn ideas into reality for Second Life and came up with a vending machine selling t-shirts, simple and quick to create.

RRR were fantastic they gave all their time and talent for free and it wasn't long before we had the wonderful washing machine up and running. There's a set of Barnardos t-shirts to buy and we also managed to commission Airside to create a unique design to go alongside. We're hoping that later there will be more special items from friends of Barnardos, so watch this space. " says BBH consultant Pete Rogers.

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Rectification on Cofidis

My previous post, titled Have a little Cofidis, needs rectification.



It's the time of the Tour de France, one of the great sports events. The past week has seen allegations made against Rasmussen -who came through clean on 15 consecutive anti-doping tests and the climax yesterday with the positive results on the Vinikourov tests and the withdrawal of the complete Astana team.



Despite the allegations, Rasmussen kept his head cool and the Rabobank mountain-goat declassified Discovery's Leipheimer and Contador in the last mile to the finish.


This morning, before today's monstrous mountain stage I blogged on the island of Cofidis, dubbed the blog have a little cofidis, meaning confidence. I'm not sure if this was a bad omen, as today it turned out that a Cofidis member returned positive on the doping tests.




Yesterday Eric Boyer, the Cofidis manager spoke disgrace of Vinikourov, calling him a dirty ****-something and demanded the whole Astana team would withdraw from the competition. Well, it's pretty obvious which course of action should be taken now with Cofidis.




Will they draw back their Pro Tour cycling team oriented island in Second Life as well?

[Pictures by AP press]


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Have a little Cofides

Et maintenant? (and now what?)


Yesterday didn't see a spectaculair stage in the Tour de France, but a media circus and extremely volatile situation with Rabobanks' Rasmussen under attack and Astana's Vinokourov being tested positive on doping.


Hardly a time to take a Tour de SL, but I jumped in at Cofidis island.



Here's the Wiki knowledge about Cofidis:



"Cofidis is a French company, one of the Otto Group's financial services providers.
Founded in 1982 by 3 Suisses International in cooperation with Cetelem, Cofidis specializes in the consumer credit business of the 3 Suisses Group.



Its business concept of offering customized consumer loans either by phone or over the Internet has been exported to other countries - Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic and Greece. In 2003, Cofidis combined with Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe to found a new joint venture, Créfidis. And in 2004, Cofidis acquired a 66 % equity stake in C2C, the financial services provider of the French Camif Group."



Again it is a Financial Institute coming to Second Life, but focussing on their Pro Tour cycling team




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Lights out San Fran

The grid is borked, Technorati down. What is going on?



Here's the report on Mashable:



Major San Francisco Power Outage Takes Down Web 2.0 Sites



July 24, 2007 — 03:11 PM PDT — by Pete Cashmore



A major glitch for websites and web companies based in the SOMA district of San Francisco: a massive power outage cut the supply to datacenters including those of AdBrite, Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and SixApart. Around 20,000 people are said to have been plunged into darkness, but the number of web users affected must be in the millions.



Those affected are customers of Pacific Gas and Electric.

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

The Greenies go Public

Today I had an exciting talk with Jonathan Himoff, the founder of Rezzable, also known as RightasRain Rimbaud inside Second Life. The company's website itself is empty for now, but he was kind enough to send me the new corporate logo.

Since I posted on the Greenies - the softlaunch, it hit the blogosphere quite massively. Here are some posts:

The Greenies are getting a buzz. Aside from some criticism and crooky post in the Herald, I've heard nothing but cheers for the Greenies.

Me taken by Verde, one of the candid camera greenies.

Official opening party

Vint Falken wrote on her blog that she met up with a few people on the opening party, but here's the news: The official opening party still has to come!

Rezzable's official Opening Party: July 31st.

There will be a press preview around 12 am SLT and Jon really got me going for this one. There will be reveiled a sculpture of spectaculair nature, one like you've never seen before.

I jumped and said: "lemme see, lemme see", but his answer was: "Sorry mate, you'd be dying knowing and not be able to blog it."

Shortly afterwards there will be the official public launch.

Rezzables Proof of Concept

So, who's behind all of this? Caleb Booker a.k.a Onder Skall asked in his report. Is Rezzable doing this for a company? Who's putting up the cash? I asked Jon if this was a signed contract or just an expensive business card.

The Greenies is a Rezzable sim allright, no contractor, just purely a statement by Rezzable, but not to be viewed as an expensive business card, but their Proof of Concept. Rezzable wants to make sure the (virtual) world knows Rezzable is able to write a new chapter in User Experience.

The chapter will continue, there are more sims coming up!

Rezzable is hiring

Finally, if you're out there thinking "I can do this too!" give RightasRain Rimbaud a call inside Second Life as Rezzible is hiring. Rezzable is a new, small, London based firm with great ideas and projects coming up.

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Virtual Banking (11): Crédit Agricole

There's another bank in Second Life, after BNP Paribas the second French Bank in SL is Credit Agricole. I've never heard from them other than that they're sponsoring one of the Tour de France teams, but that's about it.



Here's a little Wiki-knowledge on them:


"Crédit Agricole SA (CASA) (Euronext: ACA) is the largest banking group in France, second largest in Europe and the sixth largest in the world by Tier 1 capital according to The Banker magazine. It is also part of the CAC 40 stock market index.

Crédit Agricole SA is a semi co-operative bank, being majority owned by 41 French Caisses Régionales de Crédit Agricole Mutuel. Its subsidiaries are:

  • Calyon, the investment banking division of Crédit Agricole.
  • Calyon Financial, global futures and options brokerage serving institutional investors.
  • LSA, the Asian securities brokerage division.
  • Predica and Pacifica, the insurance divisions
  • LCL (Previously Crédit Lyonnais), the nationwide retail banking network, acquired in 2003.


Okay, enough of the promo. We understand they're pretty big in Real Life. But I'm not sure they're big in SL yet. Their focus, like ING, is not on banking in this virtual world, or establishing a presence but on collaboration, mutualism as one of their hosts, Caliel Writer told me.






The Institute for Mutualism (have to watch typos here or it'll get mutilated) also exists in the Real World, though this isn't a replica.

Other parts of the sim are the boat, which is a part of history, space to set up future franchises and a piece of nature "where we can relax and which we should save and cherish" according to Caliel.





I'm by far too exited on getting out some new info on Rezzable, so I'll keep this short. I have to, since I logged out of SL so fast I forgot to save my transcript of the conversation with the kind Caliel. For more info, read Ambling in Second Life's Credit to Crédit Agricole.



One last remark though that should be mentioned. Right now everything is in French, but they're working on getting out the info in English as well.



SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/CREDIT%20AGRICOLE/119/150/23

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Baseball hits SL

It's baseball time, big time as Major League Baseball finds it's hometurf in Second Life. Near the Electric Sheep Island you will find the sim inspirationally called 'Baseball' and is the virtual home to the Yankee Stadium. The NY Yankee's are the main course of this sim, but there's promo room for the Boston Socks and a few others.



Sport is something people can look forward to, enjoy. Everyone's got its favorite team or player, whichever sport you may like. Sports generate gazillions in merchandise. Sport is big business, and no wonder the focus on the Baseball sim lies on merchandise, T-shirts, trainingpants, tops, caps, hats 'n bats and gloves, as well as the hip bling bling medallions.



The stadium itself has a few chairs less than it real life counterpart to keep within server limits.


Leave base, touch air

I can't really see much added value for baseball to come to Second Life except for merchandise. Fans would like to wear their teams' colors even in virtual life. Why not take the game to another level, chance bats to broomsticks and organise a true Quidditch game.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series are immensely popular and its final episode, the Deathly Hallows just broke every thinkable sales record, so I won't get into explaining what Quidditch is, but Second Life is the platform in which you can break away from gravity and really can script broomsticks.

I know this would probably mean a huge copyright row(ling) if you'd just started building a Hogwarts courtyard with a Quidditch field, but it would surely look better than our gravity-bound real life attempts, such as this one by Reuters.

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Monday, July 23, 2007

Get your Divers licence in SL

Whilst trying to get some new Dutch sims in front of my camera I stumbled into Diveworld, close to Dutch content creators DNB Media. Suspecting a tie in I went in, and immersed in front of a PADI office. And guess what, my wife's work is just next to a PADI diving center.



However, PADI isn't Dutch, it's everywhere, it's the Professional Association of Diving Instructors is the world's largest recreational diving membership and diver training organization founded in 1966 by John Cronin and Ralph Erikson.



It's HQ is based in California and all over the world you will find Diving Centers using the PADI method. PADI is the way the world learns to dive.



Their main venue - at least, the place where you immerse - is a 2-storied infocenter with instruction movies on diving, telling you what the gear is all about and links to the e-learning pages on the PADI website.






But off course, diving isn't about instruction, especially not in Second Life where you can dive without using all that cumbersome equipment. It's time to get out to the beach!




This is what diving is about:



It's not the real thing, but it looks good.

The sim isn't completely finished yet, and this beautiful reef is just a few yards wide yet. I'm curious to see how PADI is going to use this virtual venue in educational and promotional ways.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dive%20World/120/112/60

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Intergalactic News for July

Here's some newsbits I didn't have time to blog in the past weeks:

Second Life Blogo reports (in Dutch) on:

The Belgian Second Life Crew reports (again in Dutch) on:

3PointD seems to be too busy to keep up blogging, but a few interesting posts did come through:

Nick Wilson at Metaversed seems to be gearing up in Challenging 3PointD as the buzzplace and reports on:

KZero reports on:

Finally, Scobleizer -who's not been in Second Life for over a year now, did a blog on SL again; Second Life is trying to get rid of the nasties, which turned out to become a lively discussion between Robert Scoble, Spindoctor Eric Rice and Information Week's Mitch Wagner.

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SLBoutique ReRezzed

For quite some time the SLBoutique has been a topshopping site for Second Lifers next to the SL-Exchange. As the Second Life economy grows, these shopsites grow accordingly. Most started over a private initiative and SL-Exchange evolved into what I'd call a typical Open-Source community design.
The SLBoutique was taken over by the Electric Sheep Company several months ago and was pretty mothballed due to ESC's neglect, and in its latest design it's just pushing the ESC logo and brandname.
Today, July 23rd, the curtain falls for the SLBoutique as it will be taken offline to return in the shape of Shop OnRez come thursday. In the meantime its content will be migrated.
The Shop OnRez previews I've seen look very promising, giving it an overall slick Web 2.0 look and feel. I've never been much of an outworld shopper -primarily due to crappy navigation on these shopping sites - This one I might check out.


Last friday, ESC's Giff Constable promoted the new OnRez shop at the weekly Geek Meet. In the wrap up I've published just a part of Giff's comments on OnRez, here's some more:
"To give you a quick intro, The Electric Sheep company has long been known as a consulting company for virtual worlds, but our business goals always included building a consumer software business. Our goal is to create technologies to make virtual worlds easier to use and make information flow more efficiently.
We are launching a new brand around these consumer technologies called OnRez, with the first step launching next Tuesday. Shopping has always been important to us, which is why we bought SLBoutique in early 2006, but while we focused on our consulting business SLBoutique was neglected.
That changed early this year when we looked closely at the technology and decided we needed to overhaul the entire SLBoutique system. On tuesday we're launching Shop OnRez. Our goal overall is to make shopping easier wherever you are, and to make life a lot easier for the small businesses of SL.
We've made a lot of changes to make the whole thing more robust, to make deliveries more stable, and the whole thing better functioning. SL has some tricky things around object deliveries that took some finagling.
What really interests me though is how we're trying to bridge the Web and SL (as some others are as well). We provide a single place for a seller to load their goods, we now provide scripted vendors so they can sell those goods on the Web or in their stores. We provide search capabilities so that you can walk into a store and search right for the item you want.
The in world shopping can take the form of a scripted vendor specific to a seller, or a general OnRez shopping HUD, or a shopping kiosk you can put up. Frankly I view HUDs as rather crude, so we're also working on the open source SL client to see how we can improve shopping by embedding functionality right in the experience, but HUDs are the best we have right now!
A HUD is built on prims and LSL and it's text display and input capabilities are rough, to be extremely kind, I'd like to see more widget type functionality but that's not a tomorrow thing. we're months away from that but my view of all of this is that we need Linden Lab to improve the SL performance and scalability -- make what we have now better, but we also need to see innovation on top of this platform.

In a few weeks we'll also be relaunching the second life search engine. Linden Lab is also working on one, and I look forward to what they come up with, but we are going to go ahead and try to put out some better Web search capabilities than currently exists right now."

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Saturday, July 21, 2007

Virtual Religion, Real Salvation?

Whether negative, or positive, Second Life keeps getting press coverage. Most press coverage is obviously from techmagazines, regular newsitems or professional magazines. Once in a while there's a story on Religion in Second Life.


One of the first articles I read was in the TV-Guide of the Dutch Evangelical Broadcaster EO which reported on Second Life in april this year, soon afterwards followed by an article on Gamers.nl.

Here's a two observations I've made:


  1. Traditional churches do not yet have an understanding of the metaverse, hence falling short in their reports which give rise to criticism and work counterproductive
  2. Some churches only see the 'sin' in worlds like Second Life and feel an urge to christianize.
We've spoken on Metabrands, as being metaverse-born companies to provide services Real Life companies can't, but it seems as if there are a few Metachurches coming about as well: Churches with no Real World ties other than the Gospel. This Metachurch concept might give confessional churches a thought to ponder, as it will be hard to position them. It is hard telling where it's origins lie, like Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian or some obscure sect.



Second Life doesn't differ from the real world all that much. In Real Life sex is big business and the metaverse seems to be making the same developments as the early internet, that was seen as the digital sodom and gomorra about 15 years ago.



Nothing strange to Real Life is strange to Second Life either, but by being such a relative small and niche community, it's easy to spot these element. These elements will remain in the Metaverse, and will probably be over-represented as long as normal business hasn't found real purpose in worlds like this.



Many people come to Second Life with a purpose, but there are those out there that have no purpose in Second Life, nor in First Life. There are people hanging out at the Welcome area without a purpose in life, other than sit, chat and provoke. With regular intervals you can spot demons and Goths there, some intentional, some being mere teens without a clue to what their avatars convey, beyond 'just looking cool'

If it comes to churches in Second Life it should not be about establishing a 'church' in the Metaverse, but about being a good Samaritan. Find these people whose lives are empty and are looking for meaning. It has surprised me that a successfull programme like the Alpha Course hasn't shown up yet in Second Life.



Another course of action for Churches would be to monetize the essence of Second Life; it's freedom and anonimity. There are countries in the world where christians can't come forth without risking imprisonment or worse. Second Life may well prove to be fertile soil for underground churches and organisations like Open Doors.

Some links:

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Friday, July 20, 2007

Geek Meet Gadgeteers Edition 2

This week's Geek Meet saw a new Gadgeteer episode with a wide variety of speakers.
Fortunately there were some 'technical issues' that caused sound to be unfavorable. Fortunately since it's easier to blog this way.


First up was Giff Constable, or as you like Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep Company on the exciting OnRez shop that's replacing the well known SLBoutique.

"To give you a quick intro, The Electric Sheep company has long been known as a consulting company for virtual worlds, but our business goals always included building a consumer software business. Our goal is to create technologies to make virtual worlds easier to use and make information flow more efficiently. We are launching a new brand around these consumer technologies called OnRez, with the first step launching next Tuesday. Shopping has always been important to us, which is why we bought SLBoutique in early 2006, but while we focused on our consulting business SLBoutique was neglected. That changed early this year when we looked closely at the technology and decided we needed to overhaul the entire SLBoutique system. On tuesday we're launching Shop OnRez. Our goal overall is to make shopping easier wherever you are, and to make life a lot easier for the small businesses of SL."

Next up is Metamart's Robbie Kiama, a Geek-Meet regular and dedicated twitterati.


"Let me first tell you about meta mart and how it was started: First of all we are all about making solutions, I hope you will agree with me that back in 2005 it was hard to find stuff in SL because you had to Travel all the places to search for quality items and that's when the idea came - to do a Store that walks up to you and not vice versa. So In 2006 we introduced I think a revolutionary system - Store on a HUD, it was slow and laggy. Since then we have thought aA LOT, did lot of research and figured out - that Search is greatly needed.



In 2007 Januuary we introduced the first Store in a HUD that allows SEARCH, in 2007 march we thought that Comunity is extremely important and introduced MEta MArt with Comunity Ratings. So TODAY we are releasing new solution and I think this will be extremely great for the comunity. I hope you will agree with me - that one of the most fun things in Second Life is Seeing cool places and I think finding one isn't that easy of a task. So we are introducing a new service: metaTravel."


As far as I can tell, I've already got my MetaTravel-guide, Nick Wilson at Metaversed with the Things to Do group, but for people walking around aimlessly in SL, this could be another hit.


Today's third speaker was Anjin Meili, one of the Sculpt guru's of Second Life, driving home a "Sim in a Prim" message.




"When I first jumped on the Grid, I felt that having a model of a parcel I was building on to be highly valuble. My first mapping system first rezzed blocks, 1 for every 4x4 meter parcel, into a chunky lego map looking affair. This was refined to using polygons, but that took two prims for every 4x4 meter parcel. To map a full sim required 10,000 primatives... Not exactly usable for anything more then 'Woohoo!!! Check this out man!'




I recall when I heard about sculpties... I told my wife, Elzbiet, that they would solve my problem. I could use them to create the terrain! I was to young to play on the beta grid though, so had to just wait until they made the main grid. But as soon as they made it, within the first hour, we had our first sculpted maps.




I recall us popping over here to Dr Dobbs island, and using the LSL Logo sandbox to rez a mapping pod and make maps of this Island. The same day Sculpties were released to Second Life. As one cannot make a sculptie on grid, the challange was to provide an easy to use system that integrated with a backend capable of making the finished textures. We worked hard to build such a system, and made the on grid piece so simple, we feel its akin to buying a can of coke. You open the box, pop the top, and when its done, the probe dies and nothing is left but a URL to a finished map sculptie.




Our gadget makes these sculpted maps. Lemmie dig one out and toss it up here real quick. We have a slogan for it: Map your Sim, in just one Prim!"






That was just awesome ! This has to be the übergadget of the year in my opinion, and soon to be available on Electric Sheep's OnRez site for a lousy $L 100.. not even 50 cents in real dough

UPDATE

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Beware of flying carrots - Lowlands 2007

Summertime is a time to party. In the Netherlands there's the annual 'Lowlands festival', a 3 day music event. This year there's Second Life as extra promotional instrument.
The first promotional instrument is the carrot-rocket that's been present at the Lowlands site for years which has landed in the sim Zandvoort in Second Life and is filled with goodies.
The second element is the tiny little avatar that can be seen in the weirdest places of SL.
Though a small gig, the avatar and carrot, it's been fun to work on says Timbo Urbanowicz of Dutch content creators SLionhead.

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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Virtual Accountability

It's time you kept your records straight. Have pen and pencil ready at your virtual counter to register every sold hair-extention.





Actually, your transaction history doesn't last long. 5 days at the moment, so you can fool your accountant every week. Accountants being as they are don't like that and are coming to Second Life to poke around your virtual proceedings.




The Dutch magazine 'the Accountant' runs a story on Second Life title "Second Life, a legal no-mans land" on accountancy in Cyberspace. For an accountancy paper it's remarkably positive on Virtual Worlds, especially in light of the recent negative media sweep. Here are a few lines:




"Not only a new world is created, but a complete economy with new business models. Accountants need to get into these developments or run the risk of being out of business"

"There are people that still consider Second Life as a hype, but it looks like they are proven wrong, just like the internet-sceptics 15 years ago. This kind of virtual worlds is rapidly developing not only in technological and graphical but also in economic ways."




Price Waterhouse Coopers is looking into al sorts of legal and financial aspects of Second Life and also the Congressional US Joint Economic Comittee will come forth with a study on the fiscal issues in "virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft"



The first two pictures are of the CPA Island (Certified Public Accountants) founded by the MACPA, the Maryland Association for CPA's of which the first image is the virtual office of the KAWG&F , a large Maryland based CPA frim which immersed in Februari 2007. The last image is that of Berk Accountants, a Dutch accountancy firm, also present in Second Life since februari 2007.

The Dutch accountants primarily focus on getting in touch with Young Professionals. Hans Koning, Managing partner of Berk says “Our branche is a relatively closed world, while our future colleagues are used to much more openess through the internet. We try to anticipate in this."

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Second Life Introduction at Sogeti

During April and May Sogeti Netherlands has organised a series of seven workshops on Second Life for its employees and customers. Damanios Thetan from Damanicorp, an experienced and well known content creator explained how building and scripting worked in several workshops on advanced building.



Last tuesday a new episode was written as Damanios and yours truly VeeJay Burns gave an introduction to Second Life for a group of 120 Sogeti employees (including C-Level) and clients.




VeeJay gave a historic overview passing web 1.0 to web 2.0 and the current evolution in web 3D whereas Damanios provided the technical details on building.

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Second Life as an Artist Center

Earlier this year we saw a van Gogh exposition where you could walk into one of van Gogh's paintings and June saw the coming of Brian Eno's 77 million paintings to Second Life to name a few. Due to its very nature Second Life is becoming a haven for artists, like Paris was in the days of van Gogh and Monet.

This very nature is Second Life is its incredible freedom that makes it so easy to create new things, a freedom that can't be found to this extent in any other virtual world. Second Life gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself inside art, to participate instead of observe. Several studies of Second Life have reported that a large part of Second Life's inhabitants have backgrounds in creative professions. These creative artistst were among the first settlers to conquest this paradise and have a long track record but many new artists start to explore Second Life now as well, as a creative platform in which they can let you experience what could only be visualised on canvas before.

One of these artists with a long track record is Robbie Dingo, who just came up with another sublime machinima (a movie shot in a virtual world) to show the incredible potential of Second Life. On his blog he introduces the movie:

"Ever looked at your favorite painting and wished you could wander inside, to look at it from different perspectives? Spend a single day in one of mine, from early sunrise on a new day, to dusk when lights come on in cosy homes; through a peaceful night, till morning."

Find the links to this incredible movie here. For more detail on how this was put together, have a look at this article by Wagner Jame Au over at New World Notes).

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Advanced Content Creation

Two days ago I remarked on this blog that I hadn't heard a lot on Alyssa LaRoche a.k.a. Aimee Weber lately. Almost instantaniously she proved me wrong. Here's the comment left on the blogpost:



"Thanks for the interest in Aimee Weber Studio. I've actually been so busy, I haven't had time to update my website. Since the last entry on the AWS website, Aimee Weber Studio has done the following:



  • Worked as Project manager for NBC's treelighting ceremony along with Bedazzle and Electric Sheep.
  • We built the House of Horizons build for IBM.
  • Created Bild-T's island for the SL tabloid The Avastar.
  • We created the Yak Shack for the charitable organization Save the Children.
  • We are currently working on the in-world press kiosks for PR Newswire.
  • We are also working on several projects that we are not yet able to announce including a major automotive company and restaurant chain.
  • Finally, I'm the lead author for the Official Second Life Advanced Content Creation textbook entitled "Creating Your World" due out in October and I have been speaking at shows such as Computerworld.
Aimee Weber Studio has never stopped growing and has recently been hiring full time employees and providing health and dental.I hope this is enough. If I did anymore I would collapse. :D But I will be sure to add a website update to my daunting to-do list!!"



Following on this post I had quite a long IM session with Aimee. On this blog and other blogs there have been lots of comments on old style media that are currently in a negative swing on Second Life. In the regular 'print' the current reading is that companies are getting out of Second Life, have second thoughts, or are very much disappointed. This certainly is not the case for Aimee Weber Studios.



"Not on my end. There are certainly lots of inquiries. I am sure the bubble burst will happen eventually. Which I don't think I mind. I enjoy projects that use SL as an educational platform as much as the advertising stuff. Not that a bubble burst would indicate the irrelevance of SL as a marketing platform."



We were quite in agreement right now SL is offering more freedom than any other platform. Maybe in 5 years SL will be overtaken, but for now it's the ideal environment to explore the Metaverse.

One of the projects Aimee has been working on is a new book on advanced content creation, titled "Creating your World" which will be available at Amazon shortly. As far as I could tell from the previews the book is completely in style with the official Guide to Second Life, giving it that familiar touch and will be an interesting insight into virtual creationism.



"I tried to avoid simple "how-to" explanations in favor of providing a deeper understanding of what is going on behind the scenes. Not just how to build with prims, but WHY different kinds of prims act the way they do." says Aimee.

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MindBlizzard growing

The MindBlizzard blog has been up for just 4 months, but it's growing (too) fast...

Size


This is getting a regular habit I fear. Right now I'm having a hard time publishing to my blog. It's been barely a month ago that I upgraded my hostingaccount from 50 to 100 Mb and DataTraffic limits from 2 Gb/month to 4 Gb per month.



Now, halway through July I'm at 3.2 Gb Data Traffic already and have grown beyond 100Mb.
Maybe I should start considering getting a sponsor as well.



Reputation


To look on the bright side of life: In the past month my technorati rating has rocketed from autority 26 to authority 50, and closing in on the top 100K blogs. Not bad for a 4 month old blog.




Readers


In the past months I've seen various people comment on and link to my blog, such as:


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Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Transformer Barricade

Late last night (European Standards) Liam Kanno of the V3 informed me that the new Transformer avatar Barricade was out. When looking at the map I noticed the new avatar was in popular demand as the sim was filled to the brim.

Thanks to Liam I got my copy through express delivery.

The Transformer sim is a coproduction of V3 group and the Picture Production Company which I've blogged extensively last month.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sector7/147/76/163/

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Rezzable Debut: The Greenies

A long long time ago it was a case of syncronicity as Aleister Kronos wondered wtf Rezzable was when he spotted them on the Second Life map, just as I was befriending the founder through Linked-In without knowing he was of Rezzable.

Today I got a preview of their first big sim release, and it ROCKS!



Here's the story:

"The Greenies are on the Grid! They are somewhat lost in SL, but forgot to try to find their way home. Just some kooky little aliens, enjoying whatever they discover in the metaverse.


The Greenies Home was based on the work of one of SL's most talented and prolific artist, Lightwaves. Rezzable Productions has taken the initial ideas of the Greenies and developed this exciting, top-quality entertainment area.


The Greenies home is good fun, built to maximize the SL user experience. We have focused on exploration, fun activities and giving SL residents plenty of room to goof around! We hope you enjoy!"



The tour starts underground, be sure to get the fantastic freebee jetpack, jetboots and helmet.





Enter the supersized world of the Greenies






And Enjoy!
The sim has a great look and feel, with a taste eye for detail and texture. The scene made me feel like I was inside one of the sims from Tad William's Otherland. If this is Rezzable's first release, I sure want to see their next.

CREDITS

  • Original Greenies Scene pieces by Lightwaves
  • Concepts, support and general Greenness: Edgware Marker
  • Sim Build Lead Creator and Kookiest Av in the known Metaverse: Pavig Lok
  • Sim Build Super Creator and Artist of highest order (and part time otter): LittleToe Bartlett
  • Project Management and typical unreasonableness: RightAsRain Rimbaud
  • Merchandise Designers: Crash Prefect, Ameshin Yossarian, Rebel Hope
  • Greenies Logo Design: Ayona Boa
  • Merchandise Manager: Lokum Shilova

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Monday, July 16, 2007

Fundraising 2.0

In the past few months I've seen quite a few NGO's enter Second Life, such as the Red Cross, Disabled Sports, Flying Doctors, the MacArthur Foundation , Dance 4 Life and a few others. This sudden onrush kept nagging me.




The Current Blogoshpere


When it comes to the Blogosphere there's two blogs that stick out when it comes to keeping track of these things: First of all there's Beth's Blog that has a keen eye on everything Non Profit and secondly the fabulous Ugotrade blog where Tara5 Oh (left) regularly posts real works of love and labour on Mixed Reality and with a good heart to the poor and needy of this world.



This post will probably be a work of labour and very Ugotradish in size and subject as well...



This past week I got spammed by the ElfenCircle for a Relay For Life building entry and that nagged me again. After rereading some of the entries on both the aforementioned blogs I started thinking on this post. When Al 'superscooper' Kronos blogged Virtuool and The Fight Against Cancer I knew this was a post I had to make.


Traditional Fundraising & The 21st Century Philantropist

It's actually a while since I've been giving NGO's much of a thought. We, the Dutch, have always been generous givers when it comes to relief aid and mission workers in Africa and Asia. In the past years this culture is slowly changing. It's not that people are getting greedy, but the way they want to spend their money has changed.



In the 20th century it was a natural thing to pick 2 or 3 (or more) non profit organisations and sponsor them annually. Many organisations organised themselves accordingly: You knew how much sponsors you'd have, so you know what next years'budget will look like.



The 21st century do-gooder has a different mindset though. No longer long-term commitments, long term sponsorship, but occasional, dedicated sponsorship, sort of hit-and-run style philantrophy.



This is causing traditional NGO's a severe headache since they see shaky budgets and worry about keeping all their relief aid workers at work. This isn't about 'huge disasters' those are incendent based by definition and a TV rally for Live Aid (1985) is no different than the Tsunami Fundraising a few years back; on both occasions dedicated sponsorship without long term commitment.



In short, generally speaking, NGO's need to find new ways of attracting long term sponsors: the 21st century calls for Fundraising 2.0. The question is: Is Second Life a good platform to expirment with.


Philantrophic Worlds

When it comes to actual fundraising, Second Life is surely a no-no. Tip jars containing L$ 1.600 dollars barely make up for a weeks rent. Virtual World Campaigns are not about raising enough money to fund a relief aid mission to Timbuktu.



As I mentioned in my blogpost on the Red Cross entry at Second Life, depicting a disaster zone, one way is to create awareness, convey a mood or show people the challenges in such areas. This awareness is much more valuable than the lousy linden bucks it brings in tips.



There is a thin line though; It is great to raise awareness but the cost is a consideration. The presence should be sponsored, not funded with sponsorship money.



A Bridge too far?

In search of awareness and commitment I think NGO's overstepped themselves a little. Virtual Worlds such as Second Life are to small to make a difference - yet. It's still a niche thing.



In my opinion the focuspoint of NGO's and Philantrophy should be at the heart of Web 2.0. Relief Aid in most cases is all about commitment. Commitment in small circles of sponsors that want to be informed. Web 2.0's social bookmarking and tagging is offering the ideal tools to create close range awareness. Think of Fair Trade and Relief Aid widgets for Facebook. Mission based YouTube or Flickr streams...

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Holland SL: KPN

Another Dutch company opened shop in Second Life, this time it's the eldest Telco company of the Netherlands, KPN. Their sim is half finished, but already heavily used by KPN employees.

The Dutch Secondlife.NL blog reports that KPN employees went out to STRIKE on the SL island to get better working conditions and salary.
The build is centered around the KPN logo, 3 colored domes, of which only the green one is in use yet. The others are under construction. Inside the green dome a few standard features; info and auditorium things, a few gadgets like waterski's.


A nice feature is the Text Messaging Gadget which allows you to send 3 SMS text messages to first life at the price of L$ 150.

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When will they get it?

The Dutch PCM Web (Personal Computer Magazine) picks up a story by the LA Times that companies are getting disappointed in Second Life. It is another sign of old media living in total oblivion of what is going on.


"After an enormous hype om Second Life more and more 'experts' are getting sceptic on the added value of Second Life to business. Online visitors aren't big shoppers, but are mainly looking for entertainment" reads the introduction. Where did this come from? There's hardly a real life company to be found in Second Life that's actually selling stuff. If it ain't on offer, we can't buy it.

"Successfully promoting your company inside the virtual world of Second Life shows to be harder than expected. More and more marketing departments conclude that Second Life residents feel like visiting their online stores. "Actually there isn't any convincing reason to be present in Second Life" says Brian McGuinness, a Hotelchain bigshot in the LA times, and thus his company left Second Life"

Most of these 'marketing departments' probably have never seen Second Life from the inside. Many companies just use Second Life as another medium for corporate communication... without understanding it. It's back to the early 90's when serious companies launched crappy (excuse me) Frontpage websites.

In most cases there wont be a ROI (return on investment) indeed for the year to come, or even the year after. When will companies see that Second Life is not a commercial, a product flyer?

There are companies that dig SL though. Have a look at Intel and Cisco giving tech meetings and classes on Java and other skills. take a look at Philips taking surveys, or at ABN Amro organising sponsor events for non profits.

Forrester shows brain!

One of the most telling lines in this article is the following quote: "Analists from Forrester (yay, the big reasearchers) have calculated that at prime time there are only about 35,000 to 40,000 visitors in Second Life"

Okay, prepare for another research paper (usual rates about $ 1.000,- US dollar / hard cash) telling you the same the counter on this webpage -an many many other websites - will show you every single day.

The good news is: You don't even need to pay me L$ 1,000 to get this info.

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Butterfly cocooned?

2006 must have been the year of Weber, obviously. It seems virtual butterflies don't live much longer than their RL counterparts since it's been ages since I've heard something of importance on Weber.

By the end of 2006 Aimee Weber was seen as one of the leading content creators in Second Life, mentioned as one of the virtual millionaires and founder of the Weber Studio's and said to be part of the infamous FIC (feted inner core), the clique the chique of Second Life.

Looking at her portfolio once more to see if there's anything new coming up, 'turned out to be quite a disappointment. Weber made name and fame during the first boost of Second Life, but now seems to be marginalised and seems to live a quiet life in the Stylehyve, showing off some good pieces of furniture.

Anyone knows what happened? Any good projects coming up?

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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Metaverse Map v1.1

Here's the updated Metaverse Map with an overview of 2D and 3D virtual worlds.

The large image (1024 x 1024) can be found here.

Use the map freely, links will be appreciated though ;-)


In alphabetical order:

  1. Active Worlds
  2. Areae
  3. Croquet
  4. Cybertown
  5. Cyworld
  6. Deamville
  7. Disney Toontown
  8. Dubit
  9. Eccky
  10. Entropia
  11. Everyscape
  12. Forterra
  13. Frenzoo
  14. Gaia Online
  15. Google Earth
  16. Habbo Hotel
  17. Hipihi
  18. Immersive
  19. Kaneva
  20. Manor, the
  21. Microsoft Virtual Earth
  22. Mini Friday
  23. Moove Online
  24. Multiverse
  25. Muse
  26. Nasa World Wind
  27. NGI World
  28. Ogoglio
  29. Open Sim
  30. Outback Online
  31. Palace, the
  32. Planet VM
  33. Playdo
  34. Questville
  35. Second Life
  36. Shanda Entertainment
  37. Sims Online
  38. Sony Home
  39. Sparter
  40. Stagespace
  41. There.com
  42. Towerchat
  43. Trion
  44. Uonenet
  45. Virtual Ibiza
  46. Virtual Magic Kingdom
  47. Virtual Worlds SIG
  48. VP Chat
  49. Vzones
  50. Webkinz
  51. Weblo
  52. Why Robbie Rocks
  53. Whyville
  54. World.com
  55. Worldbridges
  56. Worlds Unlimited

I know I left out Club Pinguin and Three Rings (couldn't find any good logo's) and probably missed out on a few barbie-worlds....

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Saturday, July 14, 2007

Metaverse Map

The metaverse rollercoster keeps on rolling. Next week I've got to do a presentation on Second Life and the metaverse. I've been looking around a bit and decided to throw in a few logo's of Web 3D / Metaverse initiatives.
Which ones did I miss?

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Thursday, July 12, 2007

Mini Burns

Due to the arrival of a mini Burns mr. VJ Burns won't be blogging like a maniac for a few days. Enjoy your Second Life as I have to spend some time with my First.

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Dutch Law wont Block Second Life

Dutch tech webzine Tweakers.net reports that the Dutch Minister of Justice won't force ISP's to block childpornography sites. A special note is made that the Justice department wont fix laws on 'virtual childporn' in Second Life either.


Earlier this it was reported that provider UPC would block a number of websites, in accordance with a list supplied by the KLPD, the national Police departments. Not much later KPN went along too. In March there were questions asked on virtual (child) pornography in the Dutch parliament.


Now the minister said that the providers have shown to be social consious and he does not deem it necessary to come up with regulation.

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Retooling and redefining Secondcast

Over a year ago, myself, Johnny Ming, Cristiano Midnight, and Walker Spaight launched Secondcast, one of the first podcasts about Second Life. A few episodes later, we added on Torrid Midnight. The rest is podcast history. Thus far we've recorded over 60 episodes, and average tens thousands of downloads a week.

When we started, Second Life was much, much different. There were less than 50,000 active users of SL (compared to 1.75 million now), almost no podcasts about it, and only 2000 signups a day. The community was still small enough that not enough news was generated to make it a staple of every podcast. Corporations weren't really moving into SL, save for a few stragglers (Wells Fargo, for instance). We all had different jobs.

Today, 4 out of the 5 original hosts work either directly or indirectly for metaverse development companies. There are podcasts about SL everywhere, including daily news roundups. The 8500+ sims of SL simulate an area of land larger than metropolitan Orlando, Florida. There are over 250 blogs about SL that people can read.

If you're a longtime listener of Secondcast, you know that quality has been... let's say iffy at best lately. Missed deadlines, lowered frequency of episodes, the departure of Torrid (come back Torrid!), boring subject matter.

The fact of the matter is, we're kinda stuck in neutral. Most of us log into SL now to work, not to screw around. We're too busy to see what the community is really up to, minus corporate press releases and the occasional fluffy guest. Fluffy guests and press releases make for a stifingly boring podcast.

I won't lie; some of us are getting bored. I still love doing Secondcast, but getting everyone to agree to a time to do it is becoming difficult, doubly so because we never know what we're doing for the show. Secondcast has always been about fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants journalism/entertainment, but if we don't have a solid recording plan, things go south (unless we're very fortunate). If it's a show about some new corporation/project done by one of the metaverse development companies, I pretty much tune out. Yes, during recording. You know I'm bored of the subject matter if you don't hear me make any sort of joke or counter-argument for a while: chances are I'm surfing the 'net while everyone else asks the questions.

So what I'm asking is, what would you guys, the longtime listeners of Secondcast, like for us to become? Be as creative as you'd like; more guests, less hosts (firing some of us), new hosts (replacing some of us), new format (video, call-in, audience-based, blog based) ?

I still love Secondcast; it's generally one of the highlights of an otherwise very busy week. I want to continue doing it, but it doesn't mean much if nobody's around to listen to us ramble on about Radio Shacks and Chuckie Cheeses.

What should we do? We're listening.

Suzanne Vega back in SL

Second Life Insider reports:

Want to come and hang out with Suzanne Vega to celebrate the release of her new album, Beauty and Crime? Organize your invitation here - heaven knows this is going to fill up quickly.
Vega will be appearing in Second Life on Friday, July 13 at 4pm SLT (US Pacific), and will be available to chat with attendees inworld.

"Every visitor will receive a free player for Beauty & Crime, which can be used to outfit their avatar or to host a listening party of their own. Second Life users can also create their own musical street graffiti, explore the sounds of the city, and watch concert footage recorded live at the Hiro Ballroom in New York."
The good thing about this one is that it's by invitation. Don't want to ruin Beauty by lag and Crime by Griefers.

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MiniVille

For those of you that find Second Life or any other Metaverse a bit overwhelming, here's Miniville. It's French though, so I had a hard time figuring out what you can and cannot do on this site.
It lets you create a nice little village by the sea.

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Genealogy meet Web 2.0

Welcome to the 21st Century! This is the age of fast, slick webapplications. The first half of this decennium we've had the Web 2.0 boost and now we're getting ready to rock on Web 3D.

Aside from playing with new cool apps I've got about three hobbies which are so 20th century:
  1. Model trains
  2. Stamp Collecting
  3. Genealogy
Especially when looking at Genealogy many people are under the impression that it is soooooo boring, dusty archive work. That's gonna change though: Genealogy meets Web 2.0 in the new Geni app (currently in Beta)
Geni is a cool app that has a very neat interface and lets you add people directly, elevating Genealogy to a social bookmarking and networking gig.
In this first shot you see your startingpoint, the person of the year 2006: YOU
Easily add relatives, preferably by email to get the social networking on a roll.
There's lots of Profiling to do on this second screenshot. To really get it kicking it would need widgets and it'll be up for Facebook and Myspace competition.
The third screener is about localising your friends and family

As for social bookmarking, it's got potential, but for genealogy freaks it's a start. The real genfreaks are desperately waiting for a GEDCOM interface.

GEDCOM is the standard format for importing and exporting family trees and works with known programs such as Aldfaer, phpGedview and TNG and every other thinkable Genealogy software. Imagine I've got to retype all 5,000 family members (back to 1500) into this app when I've already have them databased!

As far as the forums are a good thing to go by, Geni is offering a GEDCOM export (in alpha stage), but GEDCOM (v. 5.5) import isn't sorted out yet. It was planned for this release, but is delayed.

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Mystical Benchmarking

Mystical Cookie, creator of Mystitool, "your Swiss Army knife for Second Life", brings a new cool app for Second Life; Benchmarking Server Performance

NickWilson, at Metaversed wrote this:
"A new tool, released just hours ago, aims to benchmark the performance of Second Life servers by running resource intensive scripts within a region, allowing residents to compare performance statistics before shelling out hard earnede Linden dollars on a new home. Mystical Cookie, creator of Second Life's favorite swiss army knife utility, the MystiTool, today released her "benchmark sim tester", that once rezzed, will perform a number of tests upon the island it inhabits, producing a score that can be comared against other islands."

Below you'll see Nick in awe

Performance is a well known issue in Second Life, and Linden Labs themselves are trying to find ways to pull together the ultimate performance testing strategy. However, it's hard to get 3.000 people to jump on one sim for stress testing. Professionally speaking that would costs thousands of dollars for a single stress test.

Will this new app be the desired tooling? Or will it 'just' be a gadget?

I put it to the test and had a Sr. Test Engineer from Sogeti's Expertunit "Process of Automating Quality Assurance and Testing" (PAQT) have a look at it.

"It is a nice tool for users who want to have some quick info on their sim, see if it's up to speed. In no way it is a performance testing tool. In performance testing we look as much as possible to realistic usage. During testing we monitor various systemresources of several servers. This can't be done with this tool (yet), but it's worth to have a look at it and see how it develops."

Sofar, a gadget, but with the right progging it might evolve

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AjaxLife an Odyssey

"In Homer's Iliad he (Ajax) is described as of great stature and colossal frame, the tallest and strongest of all the Achaeans, second only to his cousin Achilles in skill-at-arms, and the 'bulwark of the Achaeans'. He was trained by the centaur Chiron (who had also trained his father, Telamon, and Achilles' father Peleus), at the same time as Achilles. Aside from Achilles, Ajax is the most valuable warrior in Agamemnon's army (along with Diomedes), though he is not as cunning as Nestor, Idomeneus, or Odysseus. He commands his army wielding a great hammer and a huge shield made of seven ox-hides with a layer of bronze. He is not wounded in any of the battles described in the Iliad."

[source: Wikipedia]


In Short, Ajax is colossal, Ajax is a winner. Doesn't he just Rock?

The Trojan war is long gone, but Ajax has come back to life in AjaxLife, as an Ajax based Webbrowser for Second Life.

Katherine Berry, a TeenGrid resident has created an impressive Ajax-based client for the virtual world of Second Life. Linden Labs themselves have been working very hard on the "sim-caps project", in changing asset management, backbone construction and what have you got in preparing a move from UDP to HTTP.


"The “caps” in “sim-caps” stands for capabilities. This is a well known design pattern whose biggest success has been web cookies. Now before you all jump on that, realize that cookies, properly implemented, are what make the internet go ’round. It is how every major site with accounts keeps you logged in."


This AjaxLife webviewer might well be a messenger of what fully HTTP enabled Second Life may bring when it comes to accessability.

Here's a short piece of the original post describing AjaxLife:

Due to some combination of boredom, wanting to talk to people in SL, and inspiration from a vague memory of something Interfect Sonic did, I decided to start work on an AJAX based SL client.

It’s still under heavy development, but the result so far is an application/page/site called AjaxLife. It now works on the MG (I think!)


Features
  • Basic map
  • Teleports
  • Accepting/declining teleport offers
  • Local chat, instant messages (partially — you can’t start them except with online friends)
  • Inventory received notifications
  • Friend on/offline notifications
  • Balance change notifications, etc.

In short, a project to watch closely as it has a lot of potential. If Second Life integrates with the web it will not be long untill we see the first widgets and toolbars appear.

Here some mandatory snapshots provided by Katherine:



At the start of this blog I wrote that the Trojan War is long gone... There might be a catch.

For now, the AjaxLife is running on Katherine's server. Some of my friends were wondring what it would in terms of password logging.

This is the official statement on Katherine's blog:

"If you want to use it, and trust that I won’t look at your password (which I can’t, and nothing that this does is logged, but you should always be careful and stuff), you can test it at https://secure.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife-s/login.kat"

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Real Life Cities (10): Brugge

Second Life is getting busy. Many new sims and companies from all over the world. Sometimes it looks like some countries are lagging. This seems true for the UK and Belgium, with very few companies and 'official' sims compared to the number of Brits and Belgians active in and blogging on Second Life.
The Belgians are getting upto speed though, SL-wise. Last month I blogged Belgacom as one of the first major Belgian companies to arrive in Second Life and last weekend I've blogged on the Brussel sim. Today's Brugge time.
Here are some snapshots, taken by Pieter Bosch of the SecondLife Crew blog, an excellent Belgian SL-blog.



The city of Brugge is still under construction, being build by Belgian content creators Metacon.
I've seen more and more professional content creators build Real Life cities as a promotional and community creation platform, and indeed this sim is aimed at creating a Belgian community and will be a mix of commercial and residential buildings.

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Univé:Insure your Second Life

Univé and Aegon, two Dutch insurance companies have had islands sitting out there in Second Life for months now. Univé is the first of them to open up shop on July 12.

Besides offering insurance for real life, Univé now offers the possibility of (Dutch)Second Life residents to insure themselves agains theft and other forms of damage.
At a central point at Univé island you can report damage, each incident will be registered in a database. Univé processes the claims and makes appointments with the client in Second Life for an assesment if necessary. If the damage is covered by the insurance, claims will be paid out in Linden dollars.

Pricing for this insurance is at L$ 200 per 6 months (0,57 Euro), the insurance has a limit of L$ 10.000 per claim.

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Text100 to bring Manpower to Second Life

After Randstad, Content and Kelly Services there's a new employment agency entering Second Life: Manpower.
The promotional force behind this entry is different though and is handled by Text100. Yesterday I - and quite a number of other bloggers - received a press release:

"The world of work is changing - it seems as though each new day brings a new and innovative tool for businesses and employees to communicate and interact in the virtual workplace – from telecommuting to outsourcing and, more recently, virtual worlds such as Second Life.

But as the novelty of the virtualized workforce wears off and real business starts to get done, big questions call for a response: What does success look like in this emerging “World of Virtual Work?” What are the opportunities, what are the risks? And what are the rules of engagement for employers, employees, entrepreneurs, customers and job seekers?

In celebration of the launch of the company’s island in Second Life, Manpower, a world leader in employment services, will host a virtual panel discussion this Thursday to explore these important issues. Several prominent Second Life avatars who are active in the virtual business community will address the many open questions on the “World of Virtual World.”

The World of Virtual Work – A Discussion in Second Life

When: This Thursday, July 12, at 3 pm Eastern/12 pm Pacific Time
Where: Manpower Island in Second Life
How: Click the following SLURL to be transported to the event -
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Manpower%20HQ/100/89/27/

As a Second Life resident reporting on the virtual world, you are invited to attend the discussion - and even participate - on how the virtual workforce is being shaped today. In addition, you will be among the first avatars to explore Manpower’s newly created island."

Opening parties are usually a bit crowdy, hence laggy, so I may skip this one to come back later to blog it.

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

Virtual Education: Enst Bretagne

In the northwestern area of Second Life dozens of Universities and Colleges are under construction, some in an advanced state, some still in conception stage. Today I visited the island called Telecom Bretagne, just between the University of Oxford and the Technical University of Delft.

The island is home to the Enst Bretagne, A prestigious graduate engineering schooland international research centre in the field of information technologies.

"Created in 1977, ENST Bretagne is one of the most prestigious graduate engineering schools ("Grandes Ecoles") in France. It is a public institution, under the aegis of the Ministry for Industry and is a member of the Group of Telecommunications Schools (GET). The college trains future professionals for careers in industry, services and research."

The island consists of various buildings ranging from classroom to sports centrew with research, information and meetingrooms in between. It's not a build that will win an architectural prize, but it's functionality that counts.
Originally the intention was to build a virtual representation of the Real Life campus, but that was soon abandoned as the real campus is about 5 times bigger than the virtual island.


Marie-Catherine Mouchot, the Head of Communications was kind enough to provide me with some details on the build and its intended use.
"We want to use it for both teaching and meeting. Our alumni already use it for their own meetings and we have 40% of foreign students and it's a good way to get in contact with them prior to their venue in France. We also want to use it for our students registerd in continuing education programmes so that they can get in conctact after the teaching sessions and exchange experience with the other students."

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Real Life Cities (9): Brussels

Officially it's past midnight here, so 7-7-7 is gone. I was just looking at my recent blogs and officially my blogcount for today is (somehow) 7. My last visit today was the Brussel Sim. To stress the fact it's 7-7-7, Earth Day, I've started with an image I took at the casino there.



The Brussel sim is advertised as meeting place for the (appr. 7000 active) Belgian SL residents, and it is dominated by the Royal Palace which - in this case - is an enormous casino. When I arrived, the sim was bustling with activity - 78 residents on site - but I doubt they were all Belgian. Casino's do draw crowds.








The second floor of the casino does show some Belgian Royal Hineyness and acts as a museum.
The rest of the sim (which isn't much because the palace really dominates it) consists of a few shops and two other noteworthy Brussel Landmarks: The atomium and 'manneke pis' (the pissing guy)


SLURL

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Saturday, July 07, 2007

Virtual Banking (10): Deutsche Bank AG

While I was reading this weeks AvaStar (issue # 29) there were two things that caught my eye.



AvaStar Omissions and Errors

First of all was their doublepage special on Universities from around the globe. Again I notice that there are missing several Dutch Universities which are pretty active in Second Life, especially the Free University of Amsterdam (VUA) that's been active for months now. Also, there is an error in their report on Princeton stating:

"Princeton University will open its five-sim site in time for the new academic year in the fall... ...The AvaStar was given exclusive access to the finished parts of the Princeton site.."

Well, not so exclusive. The site was (as is the case with many new interesting sites) spotted by Al 'super-scooper' Kronos who blogged it respectively at 3PointD, Ambling in Second Life and this very MindBlizzard blog having a first full set of snapshots. A little credit to whom credit is due would seem in place.

Q110 - The bank of the future

The second story that drew my attention was their short introduction of the Deutsche Bank AG coming to Second Life:

"THE future of banking has arrived in SL. Talking at a press conference in Berlin streamed live into SL the member of the board of Deutsche Bank AG, Hermann-Josef Lamberti, referred to SL as the “killer application” of the next few years that enables us to see how the future of the internet will unfold. That’s why Deutsche Bank have decided to launch their futureoriented
Q110 banking concept in SL."


This first image is a photoscreen in front of the real build. It's set up with a photocamera and a circle on the floor will tell you where to stand. Take your picture here, and have it printed on your Real Life credit card.

The build itself is inline with the current trends to let go of traditional 'gravity-bound' architecture and is basically an open banking floor with two hovering skyscrapers.


The towers themselves fullfill no particular purpose, business is done at floor-level or in three different skyboxes. Deutsche AG takes Skybox very literal in this build. The three boxes vary in style to serve different clientgroups.


One of the funny things in this build is the "Wishroom", a sort of holodeck with three theme options: marriage, future and buying a house.
I took the Future tour and was asked several questions. After each question the holodeck formed to suit my imagined future. Afterwards I received some three notecards with the Deutsche Banks tips to get where I want to be.
At the end of my visit I discovered why the towers were there. At the rooftops you'll find baseball courts.
My last thought was, why build on the IBM Boeblingen Lab sim and not a dedicated sim?

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SLive Eearth

Yay. We're climate savvy too. Even Second Life is Gore-ish today.

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7-7-7 Birthdays

Today 7-7-7 a number of Second Life residents are celebrating their birthdays. Here's a few I know, Akela Talamasca (reporter for the Second Life Insider), Jeff Barr (Amazon Webservice Guru) and Lordfly Digerido (Freelance masterbuilder)

From this spot a very happy B-day to you all.

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SLCC dispute

Second Life seems to be at the center of debate these days. This time it is no legal argument, no violation of the ToS but the SLCC (Second Life Community Convention) that's infuriated many residents and bloggers.

NickWilson of Metaversed reports:

"Second Life's SLCC mixed reality community event has been a hot topic of late. Since the publication of a "community standards agreement" which among other things prohibits the recording of panels, even by the panelists themselves, residents have been in uproar. The overbearing, restrictive rules being imposed upon attendees is not the only point of contention however. The question monopolization, and the "non profit" status of the organizers, Future United and their partners Phreak Radio, (who have exlusive rights to everything panelists and musicians produce at the show), was called into question today by vocal critic, Prokofy Neva."
[Read full article here]

Let's track back a while.

People have been working hard on getting the annual Second Life Community Convention on the road, making tons of arrangements. The Convention is supposed to be a big Fan meet, sponsored by Linden Labs, Millions of Us, Rivers Run Red, Anshe Chung Studios and many many more more and/or less known content creators.
Something happened on the way, as Moo Money reports in the Second Life Insider:
"With the registration of a couple of controversial Second Life residents, some are in a state of panic. Many feel that these individuals would hamper their convention experience. Another issue that has also cropped up is the entrance of "press" requesting permission to film. Due to these incidents, The Future United Group has decided to clarify their policies in a Community Standards Agreement."
This happened on June 28 2007 posted in the SLCC Community Standards - Agreement, which did not seem to calm down residents, but instead irritated a lot of people. A few days later irritation turned into aggravation with a waiver sent to performing artists.

The full text of the 'document' can be read at SL LIVE Music Blog and includes indeed an aburd requirement for artists. As SL Live author Slim Warrior rightfully remarks:
"lemme get this straight… I am asked to perform, having sent off an “audition mp3′ then, I fork out a fortune to get to this event. I also pay a registration fee and of course will be performing for FREE! but if I ‘don’t’ sign, I can resign from the line up…. Thanks for that! "
This has caused several artists to cancel, among which the turntable wizzard DJ Doubledown Tandino who commented "I, Doubledown Tandino, ain't gonna go livin' by no contracts no mo'."
From a performers point of view this is indeed a killer-contract for artists who write their own music and thus own the copyrights. They are asked to perform for free and give all their rights to Phreak Media so they can “recover a small portion of their costs’

SLCC's doomsday bells

SLCC's doomsday bells tolled when Prokofy Neva reported:
"Has everybody seen what a road wreck the Second Life "Community" Convention is? It's an accident going somewhere to happen, unless its sponsors, including RiversRunRed, Electric Sheep Company, New Media Consortium, Anshe Chung Studios and many more step up to the plate immediately and demand participation in, and accountability from, the organizers in the form of the Future United Group and Phreak Radio -- these intertwined FIC entities that have hijacked the conference process for years now, and whose chickens are finally coming home to roost."

SL's Land of the Free

Second Life is getting a lot more press than any other virtual world at the moment, though publicity seems to be on the negative side right now. This is bound to happen as SL offers much more freedom to their users than any other VW / NVE. Second Life is the ultimate virtual representation of the Land of the Free, the American Dream.
Linden vs. Bragg could never have been Kaneva vs. Bragg and Linden vs. Familes de France could never have been There.com vs, Familes de France. Linden vs. Woodbury could never happen in Stagespace.
These legal suits are inevitable and some will be won, some may be lost by Linden Labs, as Second Life becomes the testground for virtual law. They will get media attention, good or bad, but that should not influence our opinion of Second Life.

Home of the Brave

The case with the SLCC is different though. It is nog an argument between Linden and residents upto no good, or careless naive users that happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. SLCC is all about Enjoying Second Life. We have a mutual interest to have Second Life succeed. Both Linden and SLCC will like to see the Convention leaving positive thoughts on Second Life.
I am sure all sponsors, who have a financial interest in the success of Second Life, and all residents who invest money and/or expensive time in Second Life all wish to further Second Life's advance. With that objective in mind I would like to call on the SLCC organising comittee to take a deep breath.
Sit down together and decide a mutual course of action. Dare to rewrite and admit 'clumsiness' where possible. That would be Brave.

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Woodburied

Early april Aleister Kronos blogged on the University of Woodbury entering Second Life (he does keep up with Universities). I've meant to go over there to take a look for some time, but haven't gotten around to it.

Let's start with a quote from Al's blog:

"First stop, the brand new island of Woodbury University, also called, by a lucky happenstance, "Woodbury University". The build is only in its infancy, but since I could TP in there I thought it worth a mention. I was particularly taken with the Millennium Falcon - but I don't suppose that will survive to the final stage of the build. "Woodbury University is committed to providing the highest level of professional and liberal arts education." It is in Burbank, California, and has just over 1500 students."
Soon it became evident that their arts education may have been somewhat too liberal
By the end of april Prokofy Neva reported in the Second Life Herald on a Griefer attack of Woodbury island.

The Linden police blotter reports the following:
Date: Thursday, April 12, 2007
Violation: Community Standards: Harassment, Soliciting Abuse
Region: Woodbury University
Description: Organizing abusive attacks on regions.
Action taken: Suspended 3 days.

Well, Griefer attacks (annoying buggers starting scripts on your island such as particlescripts or floating nude images) may happen. It is a nuisance to most serious Secondlifers and more so to people investing in land, but usually it is no big deal - disturbing the peace for just a few minutes usually.
Second Life Herald reporters seem to have been monitoring this sim afterwards and
pried into this as Woodbury University was closed by Linden Labs at the start of July on account of violating the Terms of Service.
Below is a short piece from the Herald (July 3 2007):
"Sometime Saturday, Woodbury University’s Second Life island dropped off the map of the virtual world. Second Life players have grown accustomed to intermittent outages from their metaverse service provider, sometimes spinning fanciful stories about tsunami and seismic activity as part of in-world roleplay. A virtual catastrophe does not appear to have been the cause of Woodbury’s demise, however..."
Below is the notice received by one of the island admins:
Tizzers Foxchase: (Saved Sun Jul 1 12:19:36 2007) Linden Lab has continued to find inappropriate uses of the Second Life region "Woodbury University" under your control. On the 16th of April, you were informed of problems with the activities taking place in the region. Many members of the Woodbury University group (which controls the region) have been detected before and after that date causing severe problems in Second Life, in violation of the terms of service. These problems include incidents of grid attacks, racism and intolerance, persistent harassment of other residents, and crashing the Woodbury University region itself while testing their abusive scripts. Due to the ongoing problems, Linden Lab has no option but to immediately close the Woodbury University region. If you believe that this notice has been sent in error, or that the details of this incident have not been adequately examined, please address your concerns in an e-mail to abuse-manager@lindenlab.com Sincerely yours, Customer Support Linden Lab 945 Battery Street San Francisco, CA
Mark Wallace at 3pointD reports:
"What do you do when a group of troublemakers is disrupting the operation of your virtual world? If you’re Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, you ignore the griefers themselves and simply go after the owners of the land they happen to be operating from. Big props to our managing editor over at the Second Life Herald, Pixeleen Mistral, for catching the story of southern California’s Woodbury University, which had its private region in SL deleted a couple of days ago. Why would the Lab wipe Woodbury’s investment? Because a group of SL residents who were not part of the university and who have long been accused of causing trouble have apparently been using the Woodbury land to build and test their disruptive devices. There’s definitely culpability on the part of both the griefers and the university, but LL has shown some really poor judgment in the way they’ve handled the situation thus far."
From Woodbury's point of view:
"I think it is unreasonable to invite universities into the world and then ask them to stop acting like a university. I am deeply repulsed by the eagerness of otherwise smart, well-intentioned people to try to solve all the underlying tensions of SL by banning residents or entire islands at the drop of the dime. This strategy needs to stop at the doors of academe whose whole existence is founded on the idea of educating others (presumed a priori to be lacking in the knowledge they seek) and exploring new ideas together in the open communication forum known as the classroom.
We created a living campus in Second Life where people of all stripes got together, shared ideas, and learned from each other. An art gallery had just been built that was going to house a student show on homelessness in LA and powerpoint lectures on Darfur were planned. Metaverses are a burgeoning phenomenon, and rightly so, but their controllers will need to assume a more relaxed stance before users give them full credibility. I see them in the future functioning much more like a utility or internet hosting company as more people become accustomed to living out their fantasies-- and realities-- in these worlds."
said Dr. Edward Clift, Deputy Director, School of Media, Culture, & Design and Chair & Associate Professor, Dept. of Communication at Woodbury University to the reporters of the Herald
The story continues on the Second Life Herald in a piece by Pixeleen Mistral and extensive commenting by Prokofy Neva:
"Where is the academic activity? Where are the other academic groups in SL standing up for this sim? Unless somebody is willing to really, really stretch it, I fail to see how griefing posses and fooling around with builds that they themselves destroyed or were supposedly infiltrated and had distroyed (very murky story there) can be construed as academic. Self-expression perhaps, but then the kind of self-expression that fails to realize that your right to swing your fist ends at someone else's nose."
Finally the row made it even into serious Real Life press as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
"The company (Linden Labs) took the drastic step, officials said, after administrators for the university's area ignored warnings to stop avatars -- digital characters -- affiliated with its region from engaging in disruptive and hostile behavior."
The story is shrouded in many ways, but here's my two penny thought:
Fact: There has been Griefer activity on Woodbury Island
Fact: The activities are a violation of the Linden Terms of Service and spread into the region surrounding the Woodbury sim.
Linden: Woodbury has provided space for Griefers
Woodbury: We are victims
The truth is hard to find out, but there are several issues that lead me to believe that Woodbury is not entirely clean in this matter, and Mark Wallace's remark "LL has shown some really poor judgment in the way they’ve handled the situation thus far" seems a little premature.
In fact I do tend to agree with the ever critic Prokofy Neva that Linden is taking the right steps, though a little more sensitive communication would have been in place.
Quotes and Related articles are linked for further reading.

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Life in Plastic

Well, it's 7-7-7 and for many people it's a happy day. There's about 3 or 4 people in my twitter group having their birthdays. So congrats. Others will enjoy the Earth Day concerts and maybe a few will change their lifestyles because of it.

Today's a holy day, the divine 3 and 4 the number of men, making seven. Is this date purposefully chosen? Probably yes. It seems religion is a marketable product in the USA. Anyway, it's long past time we should start thinking about our responsibilities towards the world we live in.

We live in Metaversal worlds and don't pollute - right?

We'll just have to wait and see if working in a web 3D environment will benefit the environment. On the one hand it will reduce pollution because we have to travel less, on the other hand enourmous amounts of energy are used to keep the Grid alive and we, bloggers, twitterers and Metapolitans barely leave our pc's. Then there's iPhones and other gadgets...



Last night I remembered the lyrics of quite a silly song
"I'm a barbie girl, in a barbie world
Life in plastic,
it's fantastic! You can brush my hair,
undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation
Come on Barbie, let's go party!"



Okay, silly lyrics, but it is Life in Plastic that's what stuck to me. Almost everything these days is plastified. I can't do any groceries anymore without returning with a full wastebin of plastic. Fruit, Vegetables, Meat, drinks everything is wrapped in plastic these days. Every personalised brochure I receive by mail seems to be wrapped in plastic as well.

If we can't stop computing... can we at least stop using so much plastic?

Holland SL: Groningen

My last gig tonight was a party at Groningen Centrum -though I barely stayed long enough to flash a few pictures. Last week I blogged on the content creators Evident building the city of Utrecht, today it is DMA studios that are building Groningen.

Groningen is the capital of the most north-eastern province of the Netherlands (by sheer happenstance named Groningen as well) and has several landmarks, such as the Martini Tower.

This build doesn't really try to put a 'best effort' to real life likeness, so it seems, but focusses on the old Groningen Town hall which now is a neat Disco (which off course is better than Amsterdam's palace being a bordello)
DMA studios is a Groningen based media company that specializes in Streaming Media.

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Friday, July 06, 2007

A Simple Switch


I ended my last post with the following lines:
"We're closing in on 7-7-7, Earth Day and Eolus is one more climate savvy project trying Second Life as stage. Yesterday I blogged on the Spanish getting climate savvy in SL as well, and today Philips was giving out energy low lamps."

Here's a few more words on Philips. I ran into Sonja Finney -a Philips employee and SL devotee - for the umpteenth time. This time in Groningen (see upcoming post) where she handed out Energy Saving Lightbulbs.
As far as I can tell it isn't an official, but very sympathetic support of the "A Simple Switch" campaign launched by Philips late this week.
Focuspoint of the campaign is the website "a simple switch"

The key message Philips tries to convey is change your lightbulbs to energy saving lamps. On the website you can fill in how many lamps you intend to switch and then it'll show you how much CO2 and other climate-disasters you help reduce.


Well, in 10 minutes Earth Day will start here in the Netherlans, so it's time you act!


As the world will see many Live-Earth concerts scattered around the globe (causing their own climate disasters) there will also be concerts in Second Life as well as live streaming.

More info:


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Eco Savvy Eolus

Although I was stressed because of my doubledate (which later evolved into a triple and even quadruple date), tonight's main venue was the sneak preview of Eolus One.

The best way of introducing Eolus is by quoting another excellent Ugotrade post:
"I met Eolus McMillan from Implenia on Second Life yesterday. And, I heard the extraordinary story of how creative minds from different backgrounds, IBM, SAP, Wago, Zumtobel and Implenia amongst others, have come together to make a major leap towards 3D internet. The fruits of this collaboration will be unveiled on July 6th, on Second Life. The picture above shows a birds eye view of EOLUS One on Second Life.

The most important aspect of this breakthrough is the EOLUS focus on Real Life and Second Life interactions that serve to make a better world - addressing many aspects from CO2 Reduction, Energy Management, Health, to Education, Collaboration , Networking, and more."


After this excellent blog, the story was quickly picked up by Nick Wilson of Metaversed who quickly arranged a podcast interview to give us a lowdown, followed up by today's Things to Do outing.





















Our host was Eolus McMillan, or Oliver Goh gave us the grand tour of the site, which started at the museum:

"Here you can see the story of how we came up with the idea of Eolus One. It basically started one evening at a European computer exhibition. Ansi and myself met there. She had a booth at the IBM stand showing digital divergence and I was there for the energy management part.

We met one evening and found that we had a common vision to merge the projects and we sketeched out a plan on a napkin, you can see it in the corner. The idea was to bring partners from cross industries together to form a think tank."

Well, on the pics below, you can see that it worked out, there are many well known names participating in this project.

"In this building we have many aspects of every day life that we cover shopping on the first floor an exhibtion/ innovation area in the second offices in the thirs together with residential and an executive floor. Behind me you see a model of a house (still in the museum), a house that I live in in RL. The house can be fully controlled from SL"



















When we came to the control room, Oliver showed us what he meant by controlling his house from Second Life.

"What you see here it the control center of Eolus One. It is actually tied to a number of rl buildings. The idea here is to show how companies can improve Facilities management services
to make the processes more efficient and improve the failure rate.


I will be able to show you the technical parts when the exhibtion opens (which should be open by the time this blog is done). The system is linked in to ERP2005 (SAP) and the whole maintenance process is shown here. You can monitor the hvac systems, change schedules, programm the building automation system and so on. The idea of the control room is that it knows the identiy of the avatar and represents the data in the context of this person. So for example if a finance person sits here he would receive other info on the screens as a technical person"

We're closing in on 7-7-7, Earth Day and Eolus is one more climate savvy project trying Second Life as stage. Yesterday I blogged on the Spanish getting climate savvy in SL as well, and today Philips was giving out energy low lamps.

However, Eolus does hold some extraordinaire potential in making real and virtual worlds interact. This is a show to watch!

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/EOLUS/128/128/0

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Doubledating Doubledown at Starfruit

Yesterday Chris Carella (Creative Director) of the Electric Sheep Company reminded me of a new sim opening today:

"Come party around the clock and across the globe for the launch of Starfruit in Second Life! We’ll be celebrating on the third floor of the tower where DJ Doubledown Tandino will be spinning a live mix of house and eclectic music."

For once the US based content creators start considering the European contingent at Second Life by doing a multiple party show, so I should be gratefull. But I'm not. 11 AM, exactly the same time as today's Things To Do annex Geek Meet outing to Eolus One. In short, I had to run a doubledate with DJ Doubledown Tandino, one of the more popular Mixed Reality turntable wizzards. I did manage to get a small piece of the action though; here's a few partypics:
So much for the party, let's have a look at Starfruit. Basically what it comes down to is this:
"Would you like to surprise someone in Second Life and send them a real gift in real life... but you don't know their real postal address? Don't worry any more... we will take care of everything"
It is a metabrand, a gift service that operates from Switserland and delivers worldwide. For more business info on Starfruit, have a look at KZero's blog.

As you may have guessed by the opening line, the build is done by the Electric Sheeps.
There are some nice details in this build which is moving away from traditional RL based architecture.

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Thursday, July 05, 2007

ICEX - Spanish Export

Today I visited the ICEX island, which I've spotted mid april and found it open to public.

In april I wrote: "As far as I can tell from the logo in the bottom right corner, the ICEX Servicios sim is set up by the Instituto Español de Comercio Exterior." Well, I was right.

In short, ICEX is -as far as my Spanish goes - an Intstitute to promote Spanish companies abroad (though surprisingly I only found Spanish text and no English).
At first look the sim looks quite unorganised and messy, but some investigation led me to the website of Exporta 2007, and is about an export exposition. This explains the many corporate stands bordering the island.
The main venue is on clean energy. The picture above (right) shows some windmills and solar energy stands, and the main building (below) holds information on a solar station Spain is working on.
Now I recall a radio broadcast a few months ago where they'd discussed 'green energy' and one of the remarks was that much of todays green energy technology is coming from Western Europe and Scandinavia, and that the Southern European countries are lagging severely. Especially Spain.
What I recall from my holidays in Spain (Canary Islands and Costa del Sol) is that Spain isn't concerned with the environment at all. The country is drying up, but the coasts are getting greener and greener due to heavily showered golf-courses and palm-lined tourist resorts. As temperatures will rise and Spain will be seeing more and more sun, it would naturally be a country to invest in Solar energy technology. Now it seems they're getting that message, and now want to announce that Spain too is getting 'climate-savvy'

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Kaneva Expedition

Who thought Second Life was just a hype at the start of 2007 has to rethink. Yes, perhaps Second Life is a little hyped with an absurd amount of media attention, but 2007 looks to be the year that Virtual Worlds are going mainstream in the Western World (emphasizing Western, since Cyworld already seems to be a bare necessity in Korea)

Among the many Metaverses there's Kaneva, which I visited today.

Registration was quite easy and since there are no family names, like in Second Life, I was able to register myself as VeeJayBurns.

After the registration it's time to download. The first download, the install wizard is just 2Mb, but then the full engine is downloaded, 250 Mb, after installation about 500Mb.
One of the great features of Kaneva is the personal homepage that you get as a resident - a good start to integrate Web 2.0 and Web 3D into one environment. Think of the power of integrating Second Life with Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, Twitter/pownce and Facebook all in one!
Character creation is very limited, compared to Second Life, same pretty much goes for content creation.
Uploading textures, or patters works from webpages, which is actually a better interface than the inworld upload that Second Life offers.
Another great thing about Kaneva is, besides you getting your own 'homepage', you also get your own 'home'. That does bring back memories of First Land in Second Life (which I missed out on :-( )
A thing that surprised - in a good way - was the speed of Kaneva. Movement was quite fast. On the downside, as in SpaceStage I did not meet any people or found an easy way to wander around the world.

Kaneva does have some benefits to offer, some addons that may help to create a Metaversal identity, but is lacking in other parts compared to Second Life. For instance, Second Life really has the upper hand when it comes to content creation and the openness of the world. Also the 'mandatory' orientation island exerecises may seem to be a bit overdone, but when entering a world for the first time - without any practise, does leave you at a loss sometimes.

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StageSpace - Stage 2: The Return

As you may have read I registered at StageSpace after Tao Takashi's report to check it out.
As it was quite late I didn't do much exploring, but here's a brief on my return to StageSpace.

The welcome was warm, a nice lady awaited me upon my return. However, this was just when returning to the website. On my first visit, and on this second trip I did not encounter any other lifeform inside this world. After talking to Tao he'd noticed the same thing. Perhaps we should try and do a Geek Meet session in this environment to see how it handles a large audience.
The technique about StageSpace is quitwe interesting. It is Java (Webstart tech) based and doesn't need a client installation, which makes it accessible from about everywhere -and no updates! Starting the engine could take some time because everything needs to be streamed from the server, but with my empty inventory it doesn't take too long.
After starting the Java app you're inworld immediately. As seasoned traveller I noticed a lack of advice. It took quite some time before I understood how to walk and move my camera. SpaceStage is no open world like Second Life, but has only 3 parts in this alpha stage (hotel, disco and lounge). It is quite easy to teleport to the various locations, but you can't walk from one to the other. It isn't clear to me yet how to change my appearance and buy stuff, so that'll have to wait for visit no. 3.
This one I'll wrap up with some of Tao's Thoughts:
"Asked about user generated content he (StageSpace CEO Fabien Röhlinger) said that it might come in the future but most likely only a special group of users will be able to create new items as their main intent seems to be to keep the environment controlled.

And that’s also part of the business model because the StageSpace version you can see on their website is only a demo. The main idea is to manage individual branded virtual worlds for their clients. They will manage hosting of the server, billing, registration and the like. Their clients will get a controlled and branded environment in which members of their communities can interact. If there is an existing community already they will also provide a single-signon method so that users can log into the 3d part with their normal username and password. They claim that they can setup an instance for one of their clients in 2-4 weeks depending on integration work."

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Wednesday, July 04, 2007

United States of Apple

For readers in the United States of Apple, this blogpost may hold nothing new. Let me just wish you a happy 4th!
For readers here in Europe, or even closer to home, the Netherlands, here's an update on the iPhone craze in the States.

Mitch Wagner (Information Week) quotes:

For you who have a more visual approach, have a look at Justine Ezarik's "Tasty Blog Snacks" running a number of great vids on iPhone.

Also Robert Scoble keeps on rambling on the iPone (and this is just the last 3 days)

So...? Does it makes me want to buy an iPhone? Nah, don't think so. I have enough entertainment already seeing a complete continent sucked into a slick PR machine.

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VeeJay the Explorer

In the past months I've primarily traversed Second Life wearing an (almost) impeccable business attire. Well, surely it suits me, but does seem to be a bit out of place when sailing down the Amazon or climbing the Chichén Itza.

So I've decided to get on some outdoor kit together. Do you think it suits me?

I've been away for half an hour now before finishing this post. There's a memory that wants out.

As I said, in my current position I usually have to wear a business suit, sometimes even 3-piece. I don't have a problem with that at all, not even when its in heart of summer >30 degrees celcius. I'm quite used to it.

About 10 years ago I was a teacher, and one of the very few (and certainly the youngest) that wore a busines suit to work. However... there's this one pic in my archive that somehow seems to be model for my current avatar update.
Okay folks... don't worry, that's 10 years ago. I got rid of the earrings and the ponytail. Even shaved a wee bit.

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Watch Out! Tendence

From the Tendence website

The new tendence No Limits watches
"Today Tendence No Limits faces the market with three lines of time pieces created as a provocation and sustained by solid construction bases, such as the patented Bubble model technology, whose exclusive use of liquid silicone creates a product designed to resist 30 atmospheres, while weighing only 50 grams.The new Tendence No Limits watches combine the glamour of high-level performance and the precious features of innovative material. The crystalline transparencies of polycarbonate join the colourful sensuality of silicone and the precious qualities of Lorica."

Okay what does this outright commercial have to do with Second Life? Well, Dutch Content Creators DNB Media build an island and made two commercials from Second Life to promote the new watches. Unfortunately the island itself is closed to the public, but it's still out there.

Watch one of the videos on YouTube.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tendence/128/128/0

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Dutch NGO Island

Yesterday saw the opening of a Dutch NGO island, called "Goede Doelen eiland" (good causes island). The island is a presentation of the Dutch Red Cross and the Dutch Fund for Disability Sports. The island is sponsored by Dutch bankers ABN Amro and the Free University of Amsterdam (VUA) and was build by students of the VUA.

The island has 2 elements, a disaster zone build for the Red Cross and an athletics stadium to raise awareness for disability sports.

The intent of the Red Cross venue is to give visitors a taste of the atmoshpere in disaster areas, how hard it can be to reach a relieve post and thus try to raise commitment to the organisations work.




The 'fun' part of the island is the Stadium for the Dutch Fund for Disability Sports. In the stadium it is possible to go for a wheelchair race. Both organisations are looking for new ways of fundraising and are looking into the possibilities in Virtual Worlds.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Goede%20Doelen%20Plein/128/128/0

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StageSpace - a German VW

A German VW.... Virtual World that is, not Volkswagen. Yesterday I read Tao Takashi's review of the new German Java driven Metaverse called StageSpace.

Tao, a well known blogger and respected resident of Second Life, wrote quite qn informative post so I decided to go for a quick look.
Since it's past midnight I'll stick to a few screeners:




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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

3D Business Search Directory

Tonights Things To Do was all about the introduction of a new tool in Second Life called Business Link.

It is quite a cool new system, created by Tue Turok, and is basically a 3D business directory that aims to help Second Life residents find businesses without running into crappy, sloppy sexadvertisements and invalid locations.

Although it has much of the functionality you'd expect to find in a classic web directory, there are some interesting web2.0 tie ins.
Tonights Demo was a square setup with a search cube centered in the middle, surrounded by four walls of billboards. Once you select your category in the center, the walls around you will display the results.
Each screen is divided into several areas:

1. Top area for products
2. Center Area for Logo and Landmark
3. Lower Left for online/ofline status vendor and
4. Lower Right for website and other stuff

It's a little early to tell if this is going to be the next big SL tool since it's just launched and the directory has to be filled yet. A good thing to take into consideration might be KZero's thoughts on "Why Billboards don't work in Second Life" Normal Billboards will surely not work for Real Life brands trying to get people to visit their sim or website, but in this case it might work for the Metabrands.

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Dutch IT Professionals meet up

I've visited a nice meeting at the NGI sim, home of the NGI (Nederlands Genootschap voor Informatica), the Dutch platform for ICT Professionals.
The session started off with a welcome by Frank Langeveld, Division CEO of Sogeti Netherlands and Boardmember of the NGI and was followed by Pascal Huijbers giving us a quick overview at the collaboration initiatives and future plans.
The second part of the meet-up was the presentation of NGIJ, the Young Proffessionals of the NGI speaking on various plans, intiatives and games being set up
The meet-up ended with a brainstorm closing in on the December congres of the NGI, themed "Serious Gaming" with several seminars and events being planned in Second Life.
For more information contact Storm Stonewall or SNiCHerz Demina in Second Life
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Isle%20of%20NGI/106/106/26

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Linden Labs Legal Stuff

In a week that most citizens are getting annoyed over the SLCC code of conduct, Linden Labs themselves are working hard on Legal suits.

Reuters reports that a French court dismissed a complaint against Linden Lab on Tuesday that was filed by a French group opposed to adult content within the virtual world.



"Linden Lab said in a statement: “The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris dismissed the complaint filed by the French association Familles de France against Linden Lab, holding that the evidence brought by the association was unduly biased and should be thrown out.”
Linden Labs themselves is explaining their point of view in the Case Linden vs. Bragg":
"In his complaint, Bragg attempts to cast this as a case with broad implications about whether ‘virtual land’ – actually, access to computing resources that enable a virtual representation of land in a three-dimensional online digital ‘world’ – is subject to the laws governing real property. That is not what this case is about. It is a dispute about whether an online service may suspend a user from that service for engaging in a fraudulent scheme to obtain money, to the detriment of the service and its user community.”
and Linden Lab also alleged that
“The objective of Bragg’s scheme was to obtain access to ‘virtual land’ that was scheduled to be auctioned by Linden in the future and thus before it was available to any other users, and to acquire it for as little as one U.S. dollar rather than whatever winning bid (in excess of the minimum opening bid of U.S. $1,000.00) might have resulted from a legitimate auction” and that “After acquiring the ‘virtual land’ through this fraudulent scheme, Bragg intended to subdivide it, sell it to other Second Life users, and potentially obtain thousands of dollars in U.S. funds in ill-gotten profit.”

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Monday, July 02, 2007

Siemens in SL

Okay, big Siemens is in Second Life! new, innovating? Not really.

As I spotted the island Siemens Innovation Center I got really exited, though the shape of the build looked somewhat familiar, and yay, it is a recycle or rebranding job: the island was previously named UGS Innovation Island and only a few signs and logo's have changed.

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MSN Video: Follow the Money

Giff Constable of Electric Sheep Company speaks about virtual worlds in CNBC's On The Money segment, "Recruiting Goes Virtual"

Watch the video on MSN

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Sistine Chapel

Second Life seems to be a fine place for preserving Italian art and architecture. After the wonderfull sims of Venice and Tuscany, now there's the Sistine Chapel, brought to us by the students of Vassar College, a highly selective, residential, liberal arts college located in the heart of the Hudson Valley in New York.


Tonight at the Things to do you can get a tour and learn how it was done (1 PM SLT)
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vassar/128/128/0

Late Nite update

Here's some pics from the things to do (churches always look better with people in it)



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Metaverse news this week

Here's a short overview of intermetaversal news:

3pointD

3pointD reports on EVE online:
"With the news a few days ago that MMO space opera EVE Online had hired an in-game economist, most commentators focused on how much fun he would have compared to all the other economists in the world, and how curious it would be to read quarterly reports from an imaginary universe. I think it has broader ramifications than that, particuarly when it comes to economies such as that of Second Life and Entropia Universe, which are explicitly tied to real-world currencies. Though Second Life pushes itself as a place where real money can be earned, it has consistently done a very poor job of making any useful economic information available. Its reports don’t resemble traditional economic and business reports, and in any case lack clear explanation of their methodology. They’re useful as far as they go, but they don’t go nearly far enough — which is an inexcusable state of affairs for a place that’s advertised as a capitalist paradise. The presence of EVE’s new economist should provide at least some distant motivation for Second Life to get its economic act together."

read full article at 3pointD: EVE Online Raises Bar on Virtual Economics.

Also read on 3 pointD:
"Huge global marketing and communications company Publicis and big 3D design company Dassault have teamed up on a new plugin-based 3D browser tool called 3dswym, which will “offer a collaborative Web-based platform allowing marketers to connect directly to consumers in order to jointly create and adapt new consumer goods and new retail environments using advanced Web and 3D tools.”

read full article at 3pointD: Publicis and Dassault Dive In for a 3dswym.

Metaversed

Nick Wilson at Metaversed is keeping his eyes open as well

Metaversed reports on Cyworld
"According to GameStudy.org SK Communications, the company behind the massive online community of Cyworld recently merged with Empas, Korea's largest search engine. A quick look at SK Communications' revenue profile for 2006 shows that Cyworld is their biggest earner, having cleared them US$80 million last year. The sale of virtual assets beat out both advertizing and the sale of real-world assets via e-commerce. This is a clear demonstration of the potential of the micro-payment model in social networks of all kinds."

and on NGI:
"Network Game Interaction (NGI), a two-year old company specializing in ad insertion into both MMOG and casual games, has just secured US$10 Million in first-round venture capital funding from GSR Ventures. Currently NGI places ads in about 50 top Chinese online games, claiming a 70% coverage of the gaming populace."

read the full article at Metaversed: NGI Secures US$10 Million In VC

and even more on China:
"The most public argument for this would be Cyworld China. Since launching in June 2005 they've reached 3 million subscribers and are growing by 15,000 a day. Add to this Tencent's QQ with its half a billion registered users, and you have an audience that is accustomed to purchasing virtual items and "forming deeper connections via immersive environments."

read the full article at Metaversed: Is China's Virtual World Space About to Go Super Nova?

Ugotrade

Tish Shute has made another one of her famous lengthy and thorough reports, which as always is filled to the brim with the latest need to knows.

"I met Eolus McMillan from Implenia on Second Life yesterday. And, I heard the extraordinary story of how creative minds from different backgrounds, IBM, SAP, Wago, Zumtobel and Implenia amongst others, have come together to make a major leap towards 3D internet. The fruits of this collaboration will be unveiled on July 6th, on Second Life. The picture above shows a birds eye view of EOLUS One on Second Life."

Read the full article at Ugotrade: EOLUS Makes Leap To 3D Internet On Second Life

Ambling in Second Life

Finally there's a nice message at Aleister Kronos' Ambling in Second Life blog -again on the Virtual World business in China -
"I came across an article in the Asia Times, that you might find interesting. It concerns the burgeoning appetite - and market - for 3D virtual worlds in China. Rather than focusing on the Mindark deal, which will see Entropia entering the marketplace, it looks in more detail at the (for me) more intriguing prospect of HiPiHi. This is a "home grown" Chinese virtual world, still in Beta test, that apparently bears uncanny similarities to Second Life (although no decision has yet been taken concerning the implementation of an inworld currency)."

Read the full article on Ambling in Second Life: China and Virtual Worlds

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Pownce Review

Here's a short review on Pownce, the new IM social networking thing from the States. We've had Twitter and Jaiku and suddenly there is Pownce.

Pownce launched on june 26th into Alpha testing. So after barely one week of existence it is a little short to draw conclusions. Too early to tell if Pownce will be the next killer app or will be doomed before it leaves alpha or beta testing.

In my twittergroup it kinda hyped and everyone was screaming for invites. Why? I think two reasons:

  1. One of the makers of Pownce is KevinRose (from Digg) and
  2. Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) is on it as well.
The early signs were promising, but over the weekend Pownce saw an onrush of new users resulting in scalability and stability problems. The slick looking Adobe AIR driven client crashed several times.
There are a number of features on Pownce which I really like.
The screen below is the webinterface. Pownce has a number of very nice features, when compared to Twitter or Jaiku.
  1. You can reply to messages (and rate them)
  2. You can send files and plan events
  3. You can divide your friends in various subsets (see last pic)
Off course, there's always a downside. The first two "weak points" may not be that bad at all though, depends on how you look at the world of Ol' Bill's Crap.
  1. Not every setting works when changed in IE, works fine in Firefox though ;)
  2. My current templates works with alphachannels and transparency. Doesn't work in IE6, so the background of white text becoms white, ergo non readable.
  3. After the sudden onrush of new twitter-seasoned folks it seems as if Pownce is experiencing some problems with scalability.
  4. There's no support for mobile messaging

Finally there's some points that the lot of them (Pownce, Jaiku and Twitter) could take notice of: In this day and age of social networks and metaverses we all know eachother by different names, our real name, our social name, our metaverse name and what have you got. An extensive addressbook would come in handy.

Anyway, here's a few other blogposts

Worth mentioning is Tao Takashi's notes on the lack of mobile support and RSS:

"What Pownce is missing is the mobile side of things. You cannot yet send or receive posts via SMS and additionally only one RSS feed is there right now which is the feed of your and your friend’s posts but not the one of the main timeline. Moreover an API seems to be there as they created an external application using AIR themselves and somebody made a Facebook application but it’s not open or documented it seems."

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A Brave New World

"Brave New World" is probably Aldous Huxley's best known novel, written in the 1930's about a dystopian future based on eugenics and mind control.

75 years ago no one would have expected it to be gaming stuff, but South Korean developer Webzen made it into a really impressive-looking Huxley, a MMO first-person shooter.
Here are some screeners:

More info: http://www.huxleygame.com/index.php

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Sunday, July 01, 2007

Pownce, Facebook and iPhone

Okay, here's a non SL post again. I've finally gotten into POWNCE!
Thanks to Vincent Shore of Squawknest.

Pownce is still in Alpha, but looks like it's gonna be the next big thing.

Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. You can do it all through the web site, or install the desktop software that lets you get out of the browserbox.


The past weeks there's been a lively discussion at twitter on Pownce, which is seen by many as an enormous improvement to twitter (or as someone said: "if Twitter upgraded the things that users wanted, you'd kinda have pownce ")

(sorry couldn't grabcapture the client, but trust me, it looks slick)

The other thing that's taking up some of my time is Facebook. It's originally a Harvard Who's Who but is rapidly expanding and replacing myspace in some ways.

"Facebook isn't about college stuff anymore. I have no college network and enjoy the software as an organizational tool. "

If you'd like to know more, Danah Boyd wrote an excellent article on Facebook.

Finally, it seems like every US based friend I have on twitter has been suckered into the iPhone craze. Again, I'd have to admit it looks slick but I wouldn't buy one immediately --luckily it isn't available in Europe yet, so I'll have time to see how it develops.
It seems heavily overhyped at the moment in my opinion, though Steve did a good Job on fuelling it by stating that there might not be enough iPhone's available.
Here's a little reader question:
If you're reading this blog, could you tell me if you've bought one?

Finally, if you'd like to know more on iPhone or Pownce I'd recommend you'd visit Scobleizer's page at FastCompany magazine. Todays bloglinks give you an excellent overview on these apps / sites.
His current column is titled The New Web War.
"Perhaps the hottest debate in my circle today centers around the technologies we'll use inside, or outside, the browser to build a new kind of rich Internet application. We're talking mostly about video, because that's where the action is."
Part of his column is on Adobe's Apollo platform which is used for Pownce as well.
Robert Scoble is one of the leading ubergeek bloggers. Scoble is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft.
So, again Web 2.0 which should be about integration is getting diversificated again.

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Intel Inside

I wasn't really planning on doing a long post, since it's past bedtime here in the Netherlands. Yet I really had to do this one. I've already mentioned the Intel island yesterday and I just have to show some more pics.

The island is created by Millions of Us, who've done several gigs for Intel. This one is one I particularly like. Intel's USP is of course the Dual Core processor. This "Core" theme is worked out very nicely in this sim in an almost Jules Verne kind of journey to the center of the earth.
Basically the sim is build up by levels:
0 Surface
-1 Conference
-2 Main Stage
-3 Core


The last picture is one taken inside the conference area which seems completely lost, but attractive in its own bombastic sense.

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